OW TO -CONTROL • 
CIRCUMSTANCES- 



URSULA-NGESTEFELD 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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7 



HOW TO 
CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES 



URSULA N.'GESTEFELD 

AUTHOR OF "HOW WE MASTER OUR FATE," "THE BUILDER 
AND THE PLAN," "THE BREATH OF LIFE," ETC. 



»• ia ' t t J o o 



PELHAM, N. Y. 

THE GESTEFELD PUBLISHING COMPANY 

1901 



n\ 



1W '. '3RARY OF 
GC^CRESS, 

TwC Cu.f-it«8 KtCHIvEO 

DEC. r 1901 

OOPv«MOHT ENTRY 
CLASS Qt XXc No 

copy a. 



COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY 

URSULA N. GESTEFELD. 



(All rights reserved.) 









PREFACE. 

The effort to discern and develop inner resources, to 
adapt externals to internals as part of the discipline and 
endeavor of life, has necessary place in any plan for bet- 
terment of conditions. No one is yet at the height of his 
possibilities; everyone is embarked on the voyage of dis- 
covery. 

These pages are offered both as a gnide and a stimulus 
to those who are awake to the signs of the times, who feel 
the thrill of a new impetus toward results; the heritage of 
the many, though in past years discerned only by the few. 
The widespread state of awakeness to " the things of the 
Spirit," that is displacing the long sleep of obliviousness, 
furnishes receptivity to declarations that would fall other- 
wise upon deaf ears, upon hearts deadened to responsiveness. 
Among the many, some there be to whom what is herein 
written may be a way-shower as they seek deeper realiza- 
tion of new-old truths and gird themselves for conflict with 
long-established habits of thought, word, and act. 

It is tendered with the desire to show that within, 
rather than without, is found the Force of forces that trans- 
forms, renews, and regenerates human life, lifting it to the 
fair level of self-accomplishment and self -dominion. That 
self-discernment, self-effort, and self -attainment, for which 
we are primarily endowed, is the purpose to be fulfilled by 
our existence. 

Though published originally in The Exodus, these 
chapters will be new to many, and may serve as companions 
at odd moments when we like to rest awhile with our books 
and draw fresh inspiration for " trying again/' 

Ursula N". Gestefeld. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

How to Agree with One's Adversary 9 

Master or be Mastered 13 

True Individualism 17 

How to be Rid of Poverty 21 

Remission of Sins 25 

How to Remove Impressions 29 

Human Hens , 33 

You Live in Your Thought-World 37 

The Paralysis of Fear 41 

The Living Bridge 45 

The Power of Impression 49 

Haunted by Ghosts 53 

The Time for Weaning 57 

Making Things Go Right 61 

How the World Comes to an End 65 

How the Lord Provides , 69 

Unprofitable Companions 73 

Mental Patterns 77 

The Sin Against the Holy Ghost. 81 

Utilizing Energy 85 

Natural and Controlled Old Age 89 

The Use of Remedies 93 

The Swing of the Pendulum 97 



\ 



HOW TO AGKEE WITH ONE'S ADVEKSAKY. 

" Agree with thine adversary." 

At first that seems a queer statement, for an adversary is 
one who is opposed to us, who will work us ill; and why should 
we agree with such an one? Why not resist instead? That 
seems the natural thing to do, for, surely, we must overcome an 
adversary if we would not have him overcome us. This is plain 
common sense. 

But perhaps after experience has begun to open our inner 
eye we may discover that the best way to overcome an adversary 
is to agree with him. Does this mean to go over to his side 
utterly? 

No. It means to maintain our own, but to find out the 
nature of the adversary, why he is such, and the way by which 
his nature and its action can be made to befriend instead of 
hurt us. 

It means to find out the reason why, and from what source, 
we suffer, and through added knowledge to avoid such conse- 
quence. 

All forms of ignorance and their progeny are adversaries 
for the soul that has a great destiny to fulfil. They stand in the 
way of that fulfilling, obstacles to be overcome. When they are 
attacked and fought by another form of ignorance they are not 
conquered, and continued strife and confusion result. 

You, probably, are suffering from an adversary. Though 
" his name is Legion " you know his particular name for yourself. 
He stands squarely in your path, and look which way you will 
you see his threatening face. How shall you be able to get be- 
yond him and leave him behind? How shall you escape his 
power over you? 

By ceasing to regard him as an adversary. By ceasing to 
fear and seeking to understand him. By gaining knowledge of 
his nature and why he confronts you; why he seems to have the 
power to cause you suffering. By coming into this agreement 
with him, the agreement which is understanding in place of ig- 
norance; understanding his relation to you, and the purpose 
he serves. 

This understanding can not be gained so long as the Great 
Purpose is unseen. But you see it. You see that you are a 
living soul, not merely flesh, and that you have inherent possi- 



10 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

bilities which are infinite. You see that you are to do your 
part in the development and actualization of these possibilities; 
that their grand fruition is impossible without your cooperation. 

Seeing this, you know by logical inference that nothing 
which now seems an adversary can always successfully oppose 
you. There must be a limit to the power of all adversaries, if you, 
the living soul, are immutably destined to immortality. 

Seeing the fact of logical limitation on the part of the ad- 
versary, and as logical survival on your own part, the next thing 
to determine is " Can I find and prove the limitation of his power 
right now? " And understanding answers " You can." 

Now, how shall you agree with him? By believing that he 
can make you suffer in spite of yourself? No. By seeing, first, 
the naturalness of suffering, its place and uses in the journey 
of the soul. The soul's first teacher is sensation. The experience 
that involves sensation gives the first revelation. Sensation 
rouses resistance, a resistance which though at first blind, acts 
as an impetus forward for the soul. 

With the revelation of experience a wise, therefore a di- 
rected resistance follows; a resistance which is government in- 
stead of a running away from. Sensation is natural to the soul, 
always accompanies the soul, but changes in quality as the soul 
learns how to agree with its adversary. One kind is escaped only 
as another is cultivated. 

Your adversary is named " dyspepsia " is he? And you are 
very much afraid of him, are you? You do not need to be. You 
have but to agree with him " quickly, while thou art in the way 
with him." As a soul moving forward in the ultimating of your 
own potentialities you are "in the way" where is found the 
consequences of ignorant use of Thought-Force; consequences 
which are overcome only by wise use of that force. And you now 
are able to use this force against your sensation instead of with it; 
for you know that dyspepsia is disorder and waste of energy. 

You have been told from childhood that you had " a delicate 
stomach " and must be very careful what and when you eat; and 
this from being a dominant thought in your family has come to 
be a determining thought with you; and this thought is your 
adversary which appears threateningly before you every time you 
think of eating. 

Or, as a business man you have been so intent on making 
a success in business that you have almost entirely overlooked 
making a success as a man — as a soul; and you have pushed and 
hurried, and hurried and pushed, giving yourself and your own 
requirements no time because you thought you had none to give. 
You have eaten and drunk, slept and dreamed business, directing 
your own energy and Thought-Force into that channel and di- 
verting them from where you have needed that nourishment 
which comes from cooperation with the Great Purpose. 



HOW TO AGREE WITH OtfE*S ADVERSARY. 11 

This side of your nature has its rights and you have violated 
those rights in your haste to get rich and dazzle your fellows 
with your success. Look upon this adversary of yours, " dyspep- 
sia," and find his nature and meaning that you may agree with 
him. You can not help but agree as you trace the sequence of 
cause and effect. He is a consequence, and you have but to find 
the causes that have brought him and set Thought-Force to work 
to destroy them, to have him dissipate and disappear. Your pain- 
ful sensation incites desire for a better one, desire to seek for its 
cause as a way out of bondage to it. 

Perhaps you thought you had found it and found also the 
truth that makes free; and you are surprised that the adversary 
still sometimes confronts you. Well, perhaps when you had that 
sense of distress in your stomach yesterday you did not agree 
with him quickly but let the sense-thought get in ahead; and so 
of course the judge delivered you to the officer and you were cast 
into prison. 

This judge, you see, has no personal preferences and you 
can not be his special favorite, so escaping what otherwise he 
might impose on you. This judge is absolutely impartial. As 
the law of cause and effect it sentences you to the consequences 
of such causes as you permit to operate; and it delivers you to 
the officer of experience who casts you into the prison of sensa- 
tion, where you remain till you pay the uttermost farthing of 
your debt to the law. 

To agree with your adversary by understanding his nature 
and relation to you is the first necessity, and the second is to 
agree quickly. Do not let the sensation-thought get in ahead of 
the truth-thought. Whatever your thought, Thought-Force in 
its ceaseless action tends to bring it to pass. Your own thought 
of tendency to and suffering from dyspepsia, added to the general 
current of like thought, draws that current into you as a channel 
for it to pass through and leave its deposits. 

You must repel instead of attract it. You attract it by the 
sensation-thought, you repel it by the truth-thought; and the 
truth-thought attracts to you the great stream of truth, the living 
waters, as a channel through which it shall pass and leave its 
deposits. 

You are the chooser, you determine, and if you agree with 
the adversary quickly while you are in the way with him — on the 
instant that the sensation-thought presents itself, you will escape 
being cast into the prison of suffering because the judge will not 
have to deliver you to the officer who executes that judgment. 
Your adversary, whatever his name, always delivers you to the 
judge. And because this judge is absolutely impartial, if you have 
understanding you know what the verdict will be and that it is 
just. 

Take heed therefore to act — to think quickly whenever the 



12 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

sense or thought of evil, pain, sorrow or suffering of any kind 
presents itself. The prolongation of so many of our miseries 
comes from negligence in this respect. We are too apt to be lazy; 
it is so much easier to drift than to swim. We are so prone to 
excuse ourselves with the plea " But, of course, I can not expect 
to be entirely free from these conditions till they are lifted from 
the race." 

How are they to be lifted from the race? Only by your 
doing your part. You are a member of the race. If each member 
does his part, the whole is done. You are accountable to the race 
as a member of it. It has a right to demand of you the best you 
can do for it. You are also a soul in which dwells the Power of 
the Whole. The Absolute demands of you the exercise of this 
power. 

The tendency to excuse ourselves is a tendency to be dis- 
couraged, but with right understanding we shall be merciful to 
ourselves. That golden mean between indulgent indolence on 
the one hand and fanaticism on the other is the place where we 
need to stand. From this point of vantage we gain the best 
results. Here, the power of the individual soul over environment 
and tendencies is found, felt, and demonstrated. Here, the 
Power of the Whole can be put to practical use with the signs 
following. 

You want power. You can have it by finding it, and you 
may find it within, for it is already there, waiting your recogni- 
tion to work for you. 

The Likeness of God — what does that mean? God is Abso- 
lute. You, as a living soul, are absolute to your sensations and 
sense-conditions. They are only relative to you and consequently 
they are the lesser while you are the greater. They are for time, 
you are for eternity. They dwindle and die, you increase and 
remain. Their possibilities are finite and limited, yours are in- 
finite and unlimited. You can understand them, they can never 
understand you. 

Hence you must agree with them for they can not agree 
with you. You are eternally over and above them, you can not 
remain conformed to their pattern. Outstrip them you must, for 
the Divine Energy is constantly pushing you on. Whatever your 
adversary, however he is named, the name of the Lord is writ 
upon you, and the power of the Lord is within you. Your eter- 
nal Individuality is unaffected by any of the adversaries which 
confront you as a soul; and this is the resource from which you 
draw all that is needed for the overcoming of adversaries. 

And the overcoming is through that agreement which un- 
covers their true nature and place, and strips them of the power 
ignorantly imputed to them; that agreement which checks what 
otherwise would be a consequence through imposition of a con- 
trary consequence. 



MASTEE OE BE MASTEEED. 

Have you found by this time that as a living soul you 

are either to master or be mastered? Has this truth struck you 
so forcibly that you have awakened from the sense-sleep and set 
yourself to the work of mastery? 

If so, you have ceased to read your fate in the stars and you 
are making endeavor to follow instead the line of destiny. 

Perhaps you have been strongly inclined to think that " the 
stars in their courses " have marked out what you are and what 
you shall do and become; have settled your life experience so 
positively that there is no use in trying to work against them. 
If this has been the case, you have snapped a pair of handcuffs 
around your wrists and attached a ball and chain to your feet and 
crippled your own endeavors to accomplish anything higher and 
better than what you read in the stars. 

Here, as in other directions, you have mistaken an indica- 
tion for a fixed reality, a suggestion for a positive truth, a letter 
for the spirit beyond it. In looking intently at the stars you have 
overlooked your own nature and possibilities; in reading the reg- 
ister of mortal fallibility you have failed to find and read the 
register of divine and eternal immutability. You have allied 
yourself with the lesser, whose nature and limitation you will 
have to discover through experiencing all that you read, when 
you might have allied yourself with that eternal push which 
nothing can withstand. 

But to-day an opportunity is yours. You can choose which 
you will serve, the stars, or that which the stars themselves serve. 

Standing on one of the thoroughfares of a great city you 
see a large car full of people moving along a track without any 
visible means of propulsion. That moving car has its point of 
departure and a terminus. That is all settled. If you board that 
car you will be carried to the terminus unless you get out before 
the car reaches it. 

But this is your option as the individual, and when you give 
the signal to stop, the gripman knows how to bring the car to 
a halt though the cable underground is still moving, driven by 
the power at the power-house. The gripman is subject to your 
orders though the power still impels the cable. Your resolve, 



14 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

your mental motion, causes him to stop the car even though the 
cable does not cease moving; to do that which enables you to get 
out of the car at any moment though the other passengers axe 
carried to the terminus. 

And what is possible for you is possible for them. You 
would laugh at any one of them who was so ignorant as to believe 
that he had to be carried to the terminus of the road whether 
he wanted to go or not; and you would tell him that he had only 
to use his prerogatives as an individual to escape being carried 
there, if he did not want to go. More, you would show him that 
he could use that car as a means to help him to a certain point 
on the road instead of walking there, if he did not wish to walk; 
that he was master of the situation instead of a victim, if he chose 
to act as he was able to act. 

Have you believed yourself to be a victim to that fate marked 
out for you by the stars, moving along to the terminus in spite 
of anything you could do to prevent it? Then it is time that you 
signalled to the gripman to stop the car and let you get out, and 
if it does shake you up a bit when the car comes to a halt no 
harm is done. 

That cable moving along unseen underground has brought 
you to the point where you act as you choose, and it has served 
you well. If your fellow passengers are carried to the terminus 
it is because they do not know enough, or, knowing, do not choose 
to get out. They are being used, while you have used the same 
power. It carries them whether or no; it carries you only as far 
as you choose to go. 

What is called fate, your future as indicated by the stars, 
can run the course indicated, carrying you along, a victim; or 
you can say Stop! The Zodiac is a book, a writing to be read; 
but the hand that wrote it and the soul that reads it must be 
greater than the writing. If the soul reads " Finality! Inevita- 
bleness! " it is carried along to the terminus of the mortal road. 
If it read " Only mortal tendency! " it rises in its strength and 
majesty to say " Thus far shalt thou go and no farther." 

You do not want to be ruled by a tendency or any number of 
them. You do not want to be drawn down by gravity; you want 
to rise above tendency; and this is your possibility as the indi- 
vidual. 

You are greater than visible nature. All that you see in this 
visible world says " Come! read me! " and if you, not understand- 
ing your birthright, are appalled and weakened by what you read, 
you suffer the consequence of your own ignorance. No star, or 
any number of them, has power to determine what you shall do, 
or what others shall do to you. Though you may read, if you 
know how, variety of human tendencies, the relation between 
them, and the effects which naturally follow causes, you have 



MASTER OR BE MASTERED. 15 

but to see and begin to apprehend your God-being to say " Stop! 
you shall no longer rule me. With my divine birthright I will 
begin to rule you." 

Here is where you get out of the car and move on your own 
feet in any direction you choose. 

You say " I see operative law and what it naturally brings; 
therefore now I can use the law which has hitherto used me, and 
I will use it to the ruling and overcoming of the natural ten- 
dencies which are pictured to me in this great World-Bible, the 
Zodiac. I will no longer be the servant, I will be the Son who 
puts all things under his feet." 

To consult the stars every time you contemplate an action 
to see what they will tell you about it is to strengthen a tendency 
which should be outgrown; which can be outgrown only as its 
nourishment is withdrawn. By this course you keep it strong 
because you keep feeding it and thus give yourself more work 
to do eventually. 

The kingdom is in you, not in the stars. You say Lo! here! 
and Lo! there! when you should see the throne of power in 
yourself. You overlook the greater to fasten yourself to the 
lesser and be carried along to the terminus of the road. You will 
never be truly individual till you act as the individual — the Son 
rather than the servant. Because of your relation to Almighty 
God you have all the privileges of that relation — sonship; and 
you prostitute that relation and those privileges when you bend 
the knee to any lesser power. 

You are to be crowned King, for you are the heir-apparent. 
Why should you crown a natural tendency as king and permit 
fate, instead of destiny, to rule you? Why should you bow be- 
fore that which should bow to you — which will bow to you if you 
assert your right to rule? 

The natural man is the sum of tendencies which are strong 
and forceful. The spiritual man is the ruler of those tendencies 
who makes their very strength serve higher purposes; who sees 
and works according to that destiny compelled by origin and 
conquers the fate incidental to human ignorance of divinity. 
Why prolong the merely natural, when the greater waits to be 
appropriated? Why look to the future for what you can begin 
to accomplish to-day? 

Oh! how much we need to learn that we are in eternity now 
and that time is of our own making, its duration dependent upon 
ourselves! How much we need to learn this in order to live in 
the present, instead of in the past or future! 

We are apt to live mainly in the has been, or the to be, over- 
looking that present which is all we will ever know, and so over- 
looking what is possible now. In our eagerness to grasp the two 
birds in the bush we let from our hand the bird of the now. In 
our desire to succeed in whatever we undertake W e ^ g° the. 



16 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

very means we need for success and accept, instead, that which 
" gendereth to bondage." 

Cease looking to the stars to see if they are propitious and 
look instead to that Lord of all their hosts which is your own 
God-being, in which is all that is needed for the work you have 
to do and the success which is for you. " Look unto me and be 
ye saved." 

A sign of the times to-day is the inclination of the people 
to look outside the theological fences for knowledge. This is 
good. It shows a desire for understanding and enlightenment; 
but one can tell the degree of progress reached by observing 
where the seeker looks to find what he needs. In proportion to 
the real enlightenment will attention be withdrawn from the ex- 
ternal world and concentrated upon the human Soul till its slum- 
bering divinity awakens to become Master. 

Whether stones or stars, each tells a story; but the reader 
of the story is greater than they. 

To claim the birthright is to be done with the has been and 
ready for the to be, through possession of, not subjection to, the 
present. 

Will you get out of the car or be carried to the end of the 
road? 

Try to feel that comparative good and evil are but the 
temporary aspects which existence wears to the soul that is on 
its way from the Adam to the Christ. The way is of God; what 
the soul finds in the way is of its own making, first ignorantly 
and afterward intentionally. Through all that to it is good or 
evil runs the thread of absolute good that knows no opposite, 
the thread of manifestation of God. Positive, good; comparative, 
better; superlative, best. These degrees are for the soul which 
finds and experiences one after the other, till it joins itself to 
the best and knows the lesser no longer. The difference between 
a limited and the unlimited good is what it must experience in 
order to know the best, and volitionally unite with it — to dwell 
forever at the right hand of God. From the level of sense- 
consciousness evil is a terrifying reality. From the ethical 
standpoint there is something better. From the spiritual, there 
is the best that is all. On the plane of sense-consciousness the 
soul is a common servant; on the plane of ethics it is an upper 
servant that would like to be a ruler instead, but does not know 
how to become one; on the spiritual plane it becomes ruler 
through knowing its own sonship. 



TKUE INDIVIDUALISM. 

" What shall save me from affliction? " 

True individualism. 

Shall we look for the meaning of that answer? 

Until we awaken to the truth of our being — while we are 
sleeping the deep sleep of Adam — we are subject to the experi- 
ences natural to that sleep. Awakening is the remedy, but Oh! 
how we cling to the dream, loath to let it go, even while we ex- 
claim, " If only I could be rid of this suffering! " 

First, we must awaken from the belief and get rid of the idea 
that God arbitrarily inflicts anything upon us. This is one of the 
most stupendous errors that has ever dominated mankind. It is 
the natural outgrowth of that view of God, that makes him a 
being to be addressed as one that had it in his power to help or 
harm us, and that was likely to harm, if we did not hasten to 
placate him. 

This view divorces God from "Nature and makes natural 
phenomena, their discovered properties and consequences, some- 
thing to be set aside, if not found to be in agreement with the 
literal word of the Bible. It is a view which pits dogma against 
demonstration and blocks the way of a higher conviction that 
unites God and Nature. 

We must see, to begin with, that God does not and cannot 
choose, because the power of choice compels the possibility of 
acting in another than the very highest and best manner. If God 
can so act, then God cannot be infinite. If God is capable of do- 
ing a certain thing, when he could do a greater and a better one, 
he is not Deity but is human instead. 

God is Love in all dealings with mankind, and Love sees and 
knows nothing opposite to itself. Hence there is no power of 
choice with God, if God is Love. The sun shines because it is its 
nature to shine, not because it chooses to shine. If it could 
choose, darkness would be the equal consequence with light, and 
we could never be sure which we should have. 

We have supplicated God not to give us the darkness, but to 
be pleased to give us only the light, not seeing, that if there be 
darkness to us, it is because something has come between us and 
the light that the sun always sends out, because it is its nature to 



18 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

shine. Let us stop this supplication and apply ourselves to the 
removal of what has come between us and the light. 

You, that have been on your knees praying to God to take 
the affliction from you, rise, and stand upon your own God-given 
feet while you do what you can to put it from you! God never 
arbitrarily afflicted or punished you. You have experienced the 
consequences of your own ignorance of the one true God and your 
relation to him, that is all. Your remedy is to " Know Thyself." 

Disease is discord. You through natural, not intentional, 
ignorance are not consciously in accord with that great principle 
of your being, God. All your experience has been the natural 
consequence of your natural ignorance; for though in your real 
being you are forever united to God, in your self-consciousness 
you are a long way from that unity. Only by finding it do you 
become truly individual, and then dominant where you have 
been subject. 

Here is the key to the solution of all life's puzzles — find your 
original, fundamental, and eternal unity with God. This is what 
is sought by all religions and all philosophies. This great ne- 
cessity of finding is what makes of you — a living soul impressed 
with the different thought-patterns of the human race through 
natural susceptibility — the eventual Master of them all; the in- 
dividual that is crowned with the glory of the God-head. 

Spend no more time in vain regrets for the past, but get 
ready to be this King in the world, to whom all afflictions are 
subject, because they cannot afflict him; for his power is greater 
than theirs. The man that has nothing to lose cannot be robbed. 
The man that has yielded up his life cannot have it taken from 
him. The man that sees through temporal conditions, that un- 
derstands them as but incidental to this finding, knowing, and 
proving the eternal unity with God and the power this unity im- 
parts to the Soul, cannot be afflicted by them, because he sees 
them as opportunities for proof of what he is finding. 

" Suffer it to be so now, for thus it becometh us to fulfil all 
righteousness." 

You are a soul, living from and in that God-being that, as 
the Lord, is always one with God. Through your pain and travail 
you are to be born into your kingdom of heaven — into con- 
sciousness of this unity and accompanying power to prove it. 
When in your pain and travail you see that the sun shines, though 
you look out upon darkness; that the Omnipotent Love that is 
changeless Good is acting constantly according to, and never con- 
trary to its own nature; that healing streams of energy are pour- 
ing toward you all the time, ready to energize you the moment 
you get out of discord and come into accord with them — then 
you find your opportunity for individualizing your own soul and 
incarnating in it the divine ideal. 

This is the moment of awakening from the Adam-sleep that 



TRUE INDIVIDUALISM. 19 

is iollowed by the dispelling of the dream phantoms that cannot 
retain substantiality in the light of the sun. This is the point in 
human experience where one becomes more truly than ever be- 
fore, a man, or a woman, because one begins to be the individual; 
begins to walk, having before been carried. 

While an infant in arms that power of choice, that belongs 
to you and not to God, is latent; but now it is quickened and you 
can use it. " Choose ye this day whom ye will serve." You can 
choose whether you will continue to serve natural impulses and 
tendencies, or the fundamental unity that acts as a steady 
drawing toward God. That chain of connection with Deity never 
has, never can be broken. Eend as hard as you will, with all the 
power of ignorance and darkness to help you, and it cannot be 
broken. 

You can keep yourself in the outer darkness for a long, long 
time; but God waits; the sun always shines. 

You step out of the ranks of the sleeping dreamers, one of 
them no more, the chosen of God instead. For you have chosen 
to act and live according to unity with the eternal, instead of 
unity with the dream and dreamers. You have taken that step 
out of darkness that is sure to bring you into light, because you 
have found the way to dispel the clouds that shut out the sun and 
make the darkness. 

Steady and changeless from before time till time shall be no 
more, the light of God goes forth; but to the Adam-soul this sun 
must rise, and with healing in its beams. You must see and 
know it for yourself, I must see and know it for myself, each find- 
ing his own Lord and God and embodying what he finds. To 
individualize by incarnation the eternal truth that is for all, is the 
work we are given to do; and in the doing we co-operate with that 
eternal purpose that is compelled by what God is, instead of by 
what God chooses. 

To love darkness rather than light, is to harbor the unclean 
spirit that must be cast out for healing to follow; healing for the 
ignorantly self-inflicted wounds that we believe God to have in- 
tentionally made, as long as we believe that God chooses to act 
this way or that. 

" Thou shalt have no other Gods before me." 

The humanized God we have ignorantly worshipped — we 
really feared instead of worshipped him — has shut out from us 
the one true God who is the same toward the just and the unjust. 
Whether a flower opens itself to the rays of the sun or closes its 
petals against them, the rays are the same, the sun still shines. 
The difference is with the flower. 

In your real being you always have been, you always will be, 
one with God. As a living soul, rooted in and growing out from 
this being, you are to find and embody this unity. This is your 
destiny. You cannot fulfil it as long as you continue the proc- 



20 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

ess of embodying mortal beliefs. You are to choose which you 
will do and then set yourself to watch how you think day by day, 
for " according to thy word be it unto thee." 

You must think this unity, if you would feel and embody it. 
What fellowship have you, the heir of eternal life, with darkness? 
With pain and sorrow and woe? These are but incidents on the 
plane of sense-consciousness, and you are to ascend above them 
and know them no more. But this ascension is in soul, its register 
is in the embodiment. If right attention is given to the soul, 
the embodiment will require little. 

Do not mourn as one without hope. You have only to get 
out of the darkness into the light to have the divine sun-rays 
energize you and fill you with new strength and peace. You 
must take this step; the teachings of the Science of Being show 
you how to choose and act upon your choice. God's way is per- 
fect; you mend your own ways and bring them into accord with 
God's way. 

You become truly individual when you find, claim, and use 
your own individual relation to God; use it to the overcoming 
of all unlikeness to God, which you can accomplish by virtue of 
the power that that relation brings. 

This is the foundation that eternally is laid, and if you at- 
tempt to build on a foundation that you lay yourself, your struct- 
ure must eventually fall. What you are fundamentally is already 
fixed. What your relation to God is already fixed by the sequence 
of cause and effect. This is the eternal foundation on which 
you are to build your character, a foundation which is steadfast 
and sure. Higher and higher your building shall rise, growing 
more and more beautiful as it becomes glorified; as your original 
and pure Likeness to God appears in it, glorifying your humanity 
with divinity. 

Let nothing, no tradition, no ancient or modern authority, 
no sense of weakness or limitation stand between you and that 
One God that shall be your God. Be individual, fear nothing, 
take thought instead of being taken by it, hold by the logic of 
cause and effect, set the God-ideal before your own mental eye, 
and nothing can prevent your building what, as the son of the 
carpenter, belongs to you to build — build Likeness to God into 
your subjective body. 

This body of Light shall shine through your physical body 
with a radiance which is heaven-born, a halo which is one of the 
" signs following " for the eyes that can see and read it. " In 
him is no darkness " who feels union with God. From him shines 
forth the light that dispels darkness wherever he goes. " They 
that sat in darkness have seen great light" when the Master 
passes before them, and blessed are they, if that light draw them 
to follow after. 



HOW TO BE KID OF POVEETY. 

" I begin to see how physical conditions can be bettered by 
watchfulness of the mental state; but I do not see how poverty, 
for instance, can be alleviated in this way; and until poverty 
is removed misery must remain." 

If " overcome evil with good " is a possibility, a law, then 
whatever seems evil to us is to be overcome by our co-operation 
with that eternal good that ever works for us to bring us out 
of limitations into the " glorious liberty " that is our birthright. 
But, clearly, unless we give this co-operation, we make the " com- 
mandment " of no effect. 

While water naturally runs down hill it is possible by means 
of the adequate machinery to make it flow up the hill and serve 
our needs. This difference between the natural and the possible 
is something you need to see clearly, in order to understand why 
you should do your part toward the overcoming. 

First, as a living soul, clothed with a " coat of skin," you 
are in the way with natural tendencies which you will feel, by 
which you will be affected. If a torrent of water is rushing down 
the mountain side and you are in its pathway, you will be swept 
along by it. Naturally, you are in the pathway of Nature, and 
of that great Force that pushes on ceaselessly and compels what 
may be called natural laws. 

But if experience has brought you to the point of observa- 
tion, jostled you out of the natural passivity to natural tendencies 
that is the soul's inertia, you may see that by stepping out of the 
pathway of the torrent you may escape being carried along by it 
to the foot of the hill. If you remain in it, you will have to 
take the consequences due to the relation between cause and 
effect. If you step out of it, as you have power to do, you set 
up a cause which brings to you a different effect. 

This is your power as the individual and your possibility in 
your relation to Nature. More than this, you can not only step 
out of the pathway of the torrent and escape what would other- 
wise be your experience, but, by using your own faculties to that 
end, you could construct machinery by which you could chain 
that forceful rush to your service, and make it provide for your 
needs where it had threatened to overthrow and exterminate you. 

Force is force; it is always operative; you cannot stay it; 
but you can utilize it, if you know how. A mighty thought- 
current is surging onward carrying with it into Conditions and 
experiences all souls whose inertia has not yet been overcome; 
that are standing passive in its pathway. The common fear, 



22 HOW TO CONTKOL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

dread, and expectation of poverty constitutes a rushing stream 
that engulfs many an one that believes his conditions an un- 
merited misfortune. 

Now, if you will step out of the pathway of this stream and 
let it rush past you for a time, while you do that work on your 
own part that supplies the necessary machinery, you may utilize 
its force and make it serve your needs. You may use the force 
of this thought current to carry to results another kind of 
thought which you, as the thinking soul, may begin to create 
for yourself. For you there is a possible which compels the nat- 
ural to your service. 

Are you ready to claim your birthright and begin to establish 
your dominion, as the individual, over all things? Not only over 
what are called the " forces of Nature " but over your own nat- 
ural relation to them and tendency to be affected by them? Over 
all that seems evil, even poverty? Are you ready to do that work 
which will make these " forces " serve you, even to the removal 
of your poverty? Are you ready to seize the possibility and 
make water flow up hill? 

In our childhood days we read wonderful stories of the 
genii who could be summoned to perform men's bidding and 
bring at command untold wealth of possessions. In our later 
days when poverty has well-nigh extinguished the last spark of 
hope in us, we have longed for the ability to prove this story 
true, the power to command invisible beings to minister to our 
needs. And the power to command the natural and make it serve 
us has been latent in us all the while, requiring the hammer- 
strokes of experience to make us find and use it. 

If you wish to be rid of poverty, that incubus which strangles 
and kills too feeble aspirations of the Soul, you must step aside 
from the pathway of universal tendency to poverty through fear 
and expectation of it. You must see and know that you have 
a right to supply for daily needs, and that you should be neither 
a beggar nor a monopolist. 

" Your father knoweth what things ye have need of before 
ye ask him." 

You need shelter, food, and raiment while you are clothed 
with the coat of skin. These things are normal to the plane 
of sense-existence, and you have a right to them. But you do 
not recognize and claim your right when you keep thinking the 
fearful, anxious thought " Oh dear! I wonder how I am going 
to pay my next month's rent? I am afraid I shall have no money, 
even for food! Oh, I know I shall end in the poorhouse! " 

You are creating poverty for yourself by letting such be 
your constant thought. You are standing in the pathway of the 
torrent; and you but add to your misery if, looking at others, 
you say " If I only had his wealth! He has no business with 
so much and he ought to divide with me! " 



HOW TO BE RID OF POVERTY. 23 

Envy of others is no basis for effort for one's self. Step one 
side for a moment and see this great stream of mortal tendency 
— of mistaken belief with its offspring of misery, suffering, and 
despair. Look at yourself and see the divine impress upon you. 
In the current of the stream you are used. Standing one side 
and understanding your own nature, your relation to both the 
natural and the infinite, you can use its force to lift yourself 
into the realization of your God-given possibilities. If you will 
seek first " the kingdom of God and his righteousness " all the 
things you need on the material plane shall be added unto you 
by this righteousness. 

Here is a mighty truth to be remembered. As personalities 
we oecome our ideal. If you hold continually to the poverty-ideal; 
if this is your mental pattern for yourself, you are in the way of 
this common tendency, and it will leave its mark upon you. If 
your Soul-ideal is lifted up above its level you are being drawn 
above that level. You step one side to be drawn up. You must 
cease to think poverty. You must think supply; think it posi- 
tively and persistently; avoid the poverty-thought as you would 
avoid the very devil himself — if you believed there was such a 
being. 

" According to thy word be it unto thee/' 

Neither must you make the mistake of desiring wealth 
for wealth's sake, deluding yourself with the specious argument 
"I could do so much good with it." If you are trying to ac- 
cumulate wealth, it is because you desire wealth. Own the truth. 
Whatever you do, do not attempt to deceive your own soul. If 
you desire it, you believe it is necessary to your happiness; other- 
wise you would not wish it. 

If you claim supply for daily needs you are claiming that 
to which you have a right and you are trusting in the Lord. 
Manna falls daily in the wilderness, sufficient for each man's eat- 
ing. It always has, it always will; but each man must go out 
and gather it, and no man need have any left over, for the next 
day's supply will come with the day. This attitude is trust, and 
trust comes with self-knowledge; to this trust belongs ability 
to be poor without being in poverty. 

Poverty, after all, is largely a matter of comparison. A 
grinding poverty in which one has not even bread to eat, is pov- 
erty unmistakably. But what one man calls poverty another 
man calls plenty. The one who has enough to eat three times 
a day, two rooms to live in, and one suit of clothes at a time, 
is rich, as compared to the one who has not half as much, poor, 
as compared to the millionaire. 

We shall find that the whole question of poverty assumes a 
new aspect when we avoid comparisons between ourselves and 
those who have more than ourselves. We shall not feel half as 
poor when we stop enumerating the millionaire's possessions and 



24 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

wishing we had them. When we do this, we do not trust, do 
not see that the manna in this wilderness of sense-consciousness 
is sure to be provided for us. Oh! it is the onions, leeks, and 
garlic, that we wish, and to have only manna, even though in 
quantity sufficient for the day, is to be so poor! 

But trust is not something that makes it unnecessary for 
us to do anything. To stand in the pathway of the torrent and 
trust that it will not strike us, would show gross ignorance of 
Nature, of both our natural and our possible relation to it. This 
kind of trust would keep us from stepping to one side and using 
our own faculties for the construction of the machinery that 
would pump the water up hill to a house which we had set there. 

To be able to be poor is to have mastery of poverty. To be 
content with full supply for daily needs, without haunting fear 
for future possible ones, is to be master of the present situation 
and to have a strong hold upon the future one. " Sufficient unto 
the day is the evil thereof." Take care of the seeming evil of 
poverty in the present day and let future days alone. 

See yourself as the child of the Almighty who has a right 
to supply from the great storehouse. See that every gold, silver, 
or paper dollar, and all that dollars bring, is out of this store- 
house. Every dollar, and everything bought with a dollar, is a 
combination of elements in Nature, and the living soul, though 
unconsciously so at first, is the combiner. Analyze any and all 
the millionaire's possessions chemically, and you resolve them 
into what are called elements. Analyze them metaphysically and 
they are " resolved into thought whose substance is Mind." 

By your own persistent mental attitude, by casting out the 
poverty-idea and holding the plenty-f or-the-day idea; by affirma- 
tion of supply, instead of affirmation of lack; by willingness to 
do without wealth and by contentment with supply for needs, 
you can make the force which gives impetus to universal thought 
currents serve you and bring to pass what your word declares. 
You can summon the genii who will perform your bidding, for 
" ye are of more value than many sparrows." 

Take care, however, that you discriminate clearly and care- 
fully between wealth and supply, for here is the parting of the 
ways — black and white magic. You have a right to your needed 
share of the universal; but " the love of money is the root of all 
evil." Banish poverty from your conversation, as you have found 
it is wise to banish disease. Never tell people they are too poor to 
meet and discharge righteous obligations. Never think yourself 
too poor to do this. 

You would not think so if you were not trying to have 
something left over after paying what you ought to pay. You 
are saying, "What should I do if I got no more money after 
paying this bill? " Pay that bill and let the " if " alone. 



REMISSION OF SINS. 

" It is such, a comfort to know that all my sins have been 
taken away! " 

Yes, one would suppose that such an assurance would be a 
great comfort. But what if there is no sound basis for it? What 
if it is a belief that is not true? 

You can not suppose such a possibility? Well! perhaps you 
had better suppose it long enough to make a candid examination 
of the case. Did you ever hear of " a fools' paradise "? 

Not that you are considered a fool for believing what you 
do. Not for a moment. Your belief is quite natural because of 
your religious training. You have been taught to believe that 
the Bible is literally true, every word of it, just as it stands; 
and the Bible says that Jesus died for your sins, that he has 
taken away the sins of the world. So, of course, if you believe 
that he did this and that he was the Son of God, you are freed 
from your sins and they are gone. There is no more score against 
you. 

But suppose this view is not true? Impossible! you say. 
That is what people said when Columbus declared there was 
another world, when the claim was made that a message could 
be sent around the world in a short space of time, when it was 
said to be possible to remain in your own house and speak so as 
to be heard by some one miles away. And yet all this impossible 
has been proved possible; and why may not much of our " im- 
possible " to-dav be proved possible in coming days? 

But the possibility must have examination. It has always 
been those who would admit the possibility when others cried 
"impossible! " to whom the proof has come, for only they have 
eves with which to see. 

"Now look at vourself, candidly, for a moment. You are 
what is called an individual, are you not? That means that you 
have vour own bodv with its differing members and organs, your 
own stomach, nerves, and brain, vour own faculties and feelings, 
your own ideas and opinions. Bodies like your own, members, 
organs and faculties, even ideas and oninions, like yours are all 
about you, are common to human kind; but vours are not com- 
mon. They belong only to you. They are individual. 



26 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

You experience them and what goes with them. Your di- 
gestion is your own. You eat and digest your own dinner with 
your own stomach. You do not eat another's dinner or digest 
it with his stomach. You do not feel his feelings, you feel your 
own. Yours may be like his, or his may he like yours, but yours 
are your own and his are his own. There is likeness between 
you and him, because you are both of the same kind, the human 
kind. There is likeness between your bodies, organs, processes, 
faculties, feelings; but for likeness there must always be at least 
two, for likeness is betweenness — to coin a word for the purpose. 

With the human kind there are more than two, there are 
many, and there is, also, a general likeness between the individual 
members of the kind; but each member is what we call the in- 
dividual, and though all that makes up the individual is com- 
mon to the kind, he has only his own. 

Hence where one million stomachs are carrying on the di- 
gestive process, literally there are one million stomachs, one mill- 
ion digestions, and one million consequences; but mystically 
there is but one stomach, one digestive process, and one conse- 
quence. There is but one organ that is the stomach, that is 
not anything else; and this one organ has a certain function and 
this function has a certain consequence. The multiplicity of 
human kind does not affect or alter this oneness of organ, func- 
tion and consequence; a oneness which compels one experiencer 
— that is a dictionary word, though rarely used. 

You are the one experiencer of all that pertains to human 
nature, hence you are the epitome of the whole, for the one mill- 
ion can experience no more and no less than yourself, because 
they are but repetitions of the kind. 

If you become thoroughly acquainted with your own stom- 
ach, digestive process and consequence, literally you know only 
your own; but mystically you know the race stomach, process 
and consequence. 

If you find how to help your own and bring a consequence 
that is still better than the purely natural one, literally you have 
improved yourself, and, mystically, you have improved the race. 
Literally you have dealt only with your own organism and 
brought to yourself a consequence that is beyond the one merely 
natural to the one million because of likeness. 

You have demonstrated the possibility of the individual that 
lifts him above the plane of m^re natural likenpss to the ^ace, 
and in so doing you have offered proof to each of the one million 
of what can be done. Mystically, you have done this for them 
by doing it for yourself; but what you have done for them does 
not preclude the necessity for individual doing on the part of 
every one of the one million. 

If you, as the individual, can better the consequence of the 
natural function of the natural organ, each of the one million 



REMISSION OF SINS. 27 

can do the same. But will each do it? This is another matter. 
What you have done for them does not touch this question of 
what another, or all individuals, will do. 

While there is, mystically, only one stomach, one process, 
one consequence, literally there are many to experience that one; 
and while you have improved upon the merely natural, and have 
done this, mystically, for the whole race, each member of the 
race must experience, literally, what you have done, to have its 
benefits. While the betterment is for the one million it must 
nevertheless be experienced oy each one before the experience can 
belong to the million. 

Suppose that there was a defect in the digestive process due 
to ignorance of the nature of the organ, function and conse- 
quence. You gain knowledge of this defect and why it is and 
how it can be removed, apply this knowledge in your own person 
and see the defect disappear; and you have found and proved 
for the whole race the way out of the difficulty. 

But what you have done does not put them out of it, lit- 
erally. Only in a mystical sense have you brought to them salva- 
tion from the defect and its consequences. The literal salvation 
depends upon individual doing. So whether you gain knowledge 
of how to remedy defects or how to improve upon the merely 
natural, it is your doing that proves what can be done; and it 
is only the individual doing that can experience the result. 

The individual experience of the result is not, and can not 
be, the literal universal experience of the same result. The lit- 
eral experience can be had only by the individual doing. 

Now apply this illustration to the doctrine of salvation from 
sin through belief in Jesus Christ, and see where it brings us. 
We have committed sin, we say, but it was natural, we did not 
know better. This however does not excuse us from paying the 
penalty, for God must be justified. But belief that his Son paid 
the penalty will excuse us and justify God. 

How illogical! " As a man soweth, so shall he reap." This 
is Jesus's teaching. Does he say that some one else, himself or 
another, will reap for us and relieve us of this necessity? The 
word is " shall" not " may," and there is no " perhaps " in the 
statement. 

If you eat food, you, and no one else, will digest and assim* 
ilate it. You. and no one else, will reject or put from you that 
which is not to be retained. No one, above or below, past or 
present, can do this for you, for it is compelled by Nature and 
Nature is no respecter of persons. The law of cause and effect 
is not, and can not be, broken for you. It is deaf, dumb, and 
llind to mortal desire and petition; but it serves royally him 
who knows. 

If you stole something: from your neighbor last year, how 
can anything that Jesus did, or anything the Bible says, wipe 



28 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

out the fact? Your error is not taken away from you by one 
or the other. Whatever your sin, or error, whether it be the 
subtle error in thought or the more obvious sin in act, must you 
not put it from you if you would be rid of it? Must there not 
be this individual doing if you would experience the result? 

The world has rested too long in the inertia of the belief 
that " Jesus did it all "; meaning that you and I have not to 
do what he did, but believe instead that he was the Son of God 
offered as propitiation for our sins. He " did it all " indeed, but 
he did it for us only mystically, not literally; and this is the 
huge mistake of Christendom — making literal that which is only 
mystical. 

He showed in himself what is possible to you and myself. 
He saw, taught, and proved the way out of the Adam-sin and 
its consequences. He was, pre-eminently, the individual. His 
understood relation to God was brought to bear upon the merely 
natural with consequences that are the heritage of the human 
race. He proved the way out of sin, misery, disease, and despair, 
by walking in it, to its end, going before us to show us where 
to plant our own feet. He did for us all that the New Testa- 
ment relates of' him, but mystically, not literally. 

Hence we are not, and can not be, relieved from that doing 
on our own part, which is the putting away from ourselves all 
sense-defects and the putting on that divine Likeness that is an 
improvement upon the merely natural. He showed us what needs 
to be done and how to do it. There his work ended. This he 
could not have showed had he not the same human nature that 
pertains to ourselves, and the consciousness of the divine nature 
that we have not yet acquired. 

He bore our sins because his human nature was our own. 
He took them away because with his divinity he triumphed over 
them. What he did we can eventually do if we walk in his 
footsteps and thus work instead of believe what is fundamentally 
untrue. 

" Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be white as wool " 
when you have done your part as the individual. You can culti- 
vate a consciousness of inherent divinity till you bring it forth 
in victory over the sense-errors of your human nature. You are 
not a puppet or an automaton. You are an individual, and you 
should recognize this fact. 

All dis-ease is consequent upon sin, and sin is, originally or 
fundamentally, error in thought. All unhappiness is from the 
same cause. All weakness and sorrow has the same origin. All 
ease, happiness, strength and joy is from truth in thought. You 
are the individual thinker. Where then shall you look for the 
disappearance of the one and the appearance of the other? 

Your thoughts are your own, and their consequences are 
your own also, however common the kind is to the human race. 



HOW TO KEMOVE IMPKESSIONS. 

"I saw such a dreadful sight on the street to-day and I 
can not shake off the feeling it gave me/' 

This is not an unusual experience. We have all shared it 
at some time, and the impression made upon us by what we saw 
has haunted us for days. This lingering of the impression was 
due to our ignorance of the way to remove it, our lack of knowl- 
edge of self-protection. 

Kemembering that you are a soul, not a physical body, you 
will see that you are naturally susceptible to impression. Because 
of what you are as a living soul, standing between God-being 
?n the one side and the objective world on the other; because 
your five senses are the natural avenues through which im- 
pression is made on you; because the education of existence be- 
gins with impression, you naturally receive it, first, from the 
objective world through the senses. 

Because impression is thus made upon you, you, though out 
from God, are identified more with matter than with Spirit; and 
you live, think, and feel on the plane of impression. Because you 
have divine possibilities in you, though you are naturally sus- 
ceptible to impression, you can, when you know how, set to work 
to remove any impression previously made and of which you 
wish to be rid. More than that, you can learn so to protect your- 
self that sights, which otherwise would make a profound im- 
pression upon you, leave one slight in comparison. 

Your whole work as a soul, a work that is to bring you from 
the infancy to the glorious manhood of self-consciousness, is 
first, the experience of, then resistance to, then victory over nat- 
ural impression. This is your line of destiny in which you master 
your fate. 

You are fated to be susceptible to every impression through 
the senses, for this is the consequence of what you are as a soul, 
the consequence of the law of cause and effect. But you are des- 
tined to overcome all undesirable impression, to rule instead of 
be ruled by it. 

If you will observe yourself carefully you will see that you 
are being impressed continually with one thing after another, 
and that existence is a succession of impressions. Some of them 
are from without and others are from within. You see some- 
thing disagreeable and immediately your thought goes to work 



30 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

to stamp that impression more firmly upon yon. Yon keep think- 
ing abont it, thinking according to it, dwelling npon it, incuba- 
ting it, till it hatches into a feeling that you can not shake^on 2 ; 
till it possesses you. 

From impression to possession is not a long process unless 
something interferes to check it. Now you had better get your- 
self well in hand and set about interfering in this process that 
leads from impression to possession, for until you get ready to 
interfere you will be a victim to it. Do not stop to beg God to 
save you from it, but set about your self-salvation, for from God 
you have your power to accomplish it. Use of what you have, 
rather than supplication for what you think you have not, is the 
means to be employed. 

Are you ready? Then begin to do this one simple thing — 
meet the undesirable impression with the contrary thought. 

Simple enough, is it not ? 

" No sense in it," do I hear you say? How do you know 
unless you have tried it? 

You want to know why such a simple thing shall bring a 
result? Because impression from thought is as natural to you as 
impression through the senses, and impression from thought 
can he volitional. 

By purposely holding a thought which is counter to your 
sense-impression you make a counter impression upon yourself, 
and the strongest one will win. Action belongs to nature, and 
counteraction belongs to you. As a living soul you are impressed, 
but also as a living soul you can impress, and according to your 
choice. 

Here is your power, which, if you recognize and use it, will 
make you master where you have been servant. You do not have 
to be possessed by an undesirable impression; you can dispossess 
it by possessing yourself. Eead the New Testament and see how 
the healing of all manner of dis-ease followed upon the casting 
out of possessing devils. 

You have ignorantly allowed yourself to be possessed by 
natural impression; you must rescue yourself from this possession 
by your own volitional impression made by your use of thought- 
force. This being the necessity, begin at once to form the habit 
of " speaking the word " to the sense-impression at the moment 
it is made. 

You are walking along the street, you see a crowd, and some 
men pass you bearing a mangled form. " Oh! dear! he has been 

killed! How dreadful! " is your impression. Quickly No, 

his life is not at the mercy of accident. He is a living soul, and 
nothing that mars his fleshly body can rob him of life. His life 
is " hid with Christ in God " and he still is, whatever mortal sense 
may say to the contrary. 

Impress this thought upon yourself and it will tend to coun- 



HOW TO KEMOVE IMPRESSIONS. 31 

teract the sense-impression. To do this quickly is to avoid the 
feeling which would be generated by the thought according to 
sense-impression; avoid it in the measure that the counter-feeling 
is generated. Do not forget that thought generates feeling. To 
understand this and act upon the knowledge is to emancipate 
ourselves from a dreadful bondage. Without this knowledge and 
its practical application, without self-protection, a sense-impres- 
sion will color everything in life. 

When you saw this " dreadful " sight on the street, not un- 
derstanding what you could do to counteract the impression it 
made upon you, you described it to your family when you went 
home, and to the friends who were with you in the evening, going 
over and over it, keeping it before your mental eye. When you 
went out the next day you were " so nervous! " that any sudden 
noise made you jump, the sight of a crowd made your heart beat 
and a faint feeling came over you, and you were sure that an- 
other accident had taken place. For days you expected to see or 
hear of something dreadful as having occurred and you were 
really unhappy because you were " so sympathetic." 

That nervousness, expectation, and fear, were the conse- 
quence of being possessed by an impression. If you do not pos- 
sess your own soul, it will be possessed; that is sure. And your 
pride in your sensitiveness and susceptibility to suffering — for 
you have rather plumed yourself on your tender-heartedness — is 
proof that you are possessed by a devil as well as by an impression. 

An error-thought, the result of ignorance, made active 
through a sense-impression, has you in its grip, and it must be 
cast out to free you from that tender susceptibility in which you 
have so much pride. You must dislodge it by putting a truth- 
thought in its place. You can do this because you can, if you 
will, think contrary to the impression, instead of according to it. 
Thought is curative. Your truth-thought will help to counteract 
the impression made upon you, which keeps you on the lookout 
for accidents and makes you suffer one nervous shock after the 
other. 

" It gives me such a fright whenever I receive a telegram " 
some one says. Why? What is there in a piece of yellow paper 
to make your heart thump and then drop way down to your 
shoes? It is your thought of what that message may be, that 
makes you have that feeling. 

A death in the family or among your friends has been an- 
nounced to you in that way, and now you can never receive a 
telegram without thinking of death, because the impression pre- 
viously made upon you has not been counteracted, but allowed 
to remain. It has become strengthened by your dwelling upon it. 
Your thought has revolved around and around it. You have 
" lived it over " again and again instead of setting yourself to 
work to efface it. 



32 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

You have ignorantly allowed yourself to become possessed 
by your thought according to natural impression, and this is a 
natural consequence, but for you there is a possible consequence, 
and that is emancipation from such possession. 

" Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you 
free " from it. Now you do not get knowledge of the perfect 
truth of being — what you are in the real of you and what your 
possibilities — through your sense-impressions; and as long as you 
continue to think according to them you think yourself away 
from that truth that makes free from bondage instead of to- 
wards it. 

You cannot appropriate it, make it your conscious possession, 
until you put it into your " self n — into your own soul; and you 
appropriate it by thinking according to it in the very face of that 
sense-impression that is contrary to it. By this means you " right 
about face! " and because you are looking at the higher reality 
you have the sense-plane behind your back. 

Every soul must sometime thus turn unto that Lord that is 
its real God-being; and when that time comes for you, you will 
draw strength and courage into your own self, or soul, that will 
tend to give you mastery of sense-impressions. 

Grief is persistence of impression. It can be counteracted. 
Make an impression purposely. Make one with a purpose in it. 
You can if you will try. ^»ut you indulge your grief, indulge the 
impression, strengthen it by thinking according to it continually. 
And here, without intention, you are becoming selfish. The rem- 
edy is to become selfless — become another self, for this one that 
is so full of grief and sorrow is not a kind to be perpetuated. You 
need to get rid of it; the less of it the better. 

Action is natural, counter-action is possible; and with this 
possibility the power of the individual is pitted against natural 
tendency; and the final victory is on the side of the individual 
through the power pertaining to individuality. 

Stop excusing yourself for this or that because you were 
" born so." No matter what you were born, you have as great 
possibilities as ever pertained to any one who has lived in the 
world. Your excuses are paltry. Seek for self knowledge instead 
of sheltering yourself under a " I can not help it." " Know Thy- 
self " and divinity is possible unto you, but it is attained by mas- 
tery of the natural; not by violation of the natural but by com- 
pelling it to serve you. All that Nature — all that the Universe 
contains is for you, but you must take possession of it. 

Stop weeping and go to smiling. Smile purposely, deliber- 
ately, and religiously and thus make an impression upon your- 
self. Keep it up persistently and the impression will become 
strong enough to dominate and dispossess the "weepy" one. 
What you are naturally, is fixed, but you can become what you 
will. 



HUMAN HENS. 

You are a human being, you know, and as such you have 
a variety of aspects. Sometimes you are the personification of 
jollity, and sometimes you are the very embodiment of despon- 
dency. In your outer manifestations you run the scale from one 
to the other, up and down, showing in your face, or re-presenta- 
tion, what you are in your self-consciousness at that time. 

Do you know why? Why you re-present something? It is 
because you are a human hen. 

Does that remark surprise you? 

Because of the nature of the unit its fractions are related 
to each other. Though you are a unit, as a human being, there 
are many fractions in you, as composing your nature; and you 
will present different aspects at different times as these fractions 
present themselves — as you re-present them by manifesting them. 

For instance, the tiger in you was manifested the other day, 
when you became so angry at that man who lied about you, in 
order that he might work out a business scheme to his own profit 
and your consequent loss. 

He not only slandered you, but he deliberately robbed you, 
and when you found it out, you felt as if you would break every 
bone in his body, if you could get hold of him. You were fairly 
quivering with rage, and you were re-presenting — for those who 
could see — the natural tiger in you. For the moment, natural 
instinct was dominant in you, and it would have gone hard with 
that man if he had been in your way. 

He, in his turn, re-presented the fox in what he did. By 
cunning craftiness he accomplished his purpose and made mani- 
fest the fox nature that is naturally in him. It is one of the 
fractions. 

So, you see, whatever you are on the surface at any given 
time, you are manifesting the natural concomitants of your own 
human nature. But you have also a possibility that is capable 
of more result than belongs to a natural tendency. You, as the 
unit, are more than the tiger-nature, as a fraction; and therefore 
you can accomplish more than the fraction can. 

You can understand the tiger-nature, but it can not under- 
stand you. You can see its naturalness, its place in a unity, and 
you can say to it " You are all right for what you are, but you 



34 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

shall not rme me." The natural tiger-nature cannot restrain 
itself, but you can restrain it. It roars and strikes with all the 
force of natural tendency. When it is dominating you, because 
of this very force you are re-presenting not only what is in you 
naturally, but also your lack of self-government, your subjuga- 
tion to the animal instinct in you, when you should be seated 
on a throne, with it crouching submissively at your feet. 

Do you not see that as a human being, a personality, you 
are the means by which Nature is re-presented? Nature ob- 
jectively is spread out before and around us, presented to us 
for our judgment. And we render our involuntary judgment 
by re-presenting it through ourselves. 

In the human being, man or woman, is summed up all that 
is seen as objective Nature, and which is repeated, or re-presented, 
through him. Here is your opportunity, therefore, to re-present 
the possibility in you that is more, far more, than a natural ten- 
dency. 

Because of your likeness to the Absolute that is the other 
side of you, the side that is toward God all the while your human 
side is toward Nature, you can bring your inherent power of 
control to bear upon the tiger, the fox, the lion, snake, and bear 
that are in you, and say, " I will not that they shall reign over 
me. I will reign over them, as is my birthright, and by means 
of my God-likeness." And because the unit is greater than any 
of its fractions you can accomplish it. 

This is your line of destiny — through experiencing them 
becoming acquainted with your own composite nature, with its 
many natural tendencies; and then learning your greater possi- 
bilities through opportunities for proving them. 

This line of destiny is existence, which must continue till 
the destiny is fulfilled, and its fulfilment is mastery. Your divine 
inheritance is your possibility through your likeness to God. 
Your natural inheritance is the experiencing of every nature, 
instinct, and impulse that goes to make up your composite nature. 

Your natural inheritance is servitude to these impulses and 
emotions. Your divine inheritance is victory over them by mas- 
tering them. Your destiny will not be fulfilled till you stand as 
the tried and proved Master of your human self. 

While the tiger in you strikes and rends, you are a tiger in 
human form. Your possibility as a human being, a possibility 
not belonging to the tiger, is obscured and only the natural is 
re-presented. When you have your foot upon his neck, and ren- 
der love instead of a blow, the possibility due to your God-likeness 
is re-presented and the merely natural is obscured. 

You are an example to the rest of mankind. What kind of 
an example are you affording? The natural, or the possible? 

Yes, your protest is a natural one. You would like to afford 
the higher example, but you can not help the other one. But 



HUMAN HENS. 35 

here you mistake. You can help offering the natural one and 
you can offer the higher one instead, when you know how. Here 
we come to another nature in you, for, as said before, you are 
a human hen. 

You are an incubator, and you will experience what you 
hatch. 

Now you cannot have given your attention to an effort for 
self-knowledge without discovering that thought is creative. 
You are a living soul, you know, not a material body. Your 
present body is the means by which you manifest your grade, 
or rank, as a living soul. As a living soul with a visible body, you 
are the human being with a destiny to fulfil. 

You think thoughts. There is a natural order in your ex- 
perience. Your thought is according to impression and impulse. 
Because thought generates feeling, your feeling is according to 
your thought, and your action is according to your feeling. 
Therefore " as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." 

Where then is the point of resistance? With the action? 
Yes, this is good. With the feeling? Yes, this is better. With 
the thought? Yes, this is best of all. For it follows, does it 
not, that, if the thought is dealt with, all that ensues from it is 
affected? 

Your thoughts are the eggs you are incubating; and the 
chicks you will hatch out will be according to the kind. This 
is Nature and Law. 

As a business man you have made some money. You are 
very glad of it, for money is a good thing to have. You have 
worked many years, been careful in your investments and frugal 
in your expenditures and feel that you have a right to that money, 
for you have honestly earned it. You are not as young as you 
once were, your ability for hard work is behind you. But lately 
you found that what you had accumulated was in danger. You 
thought that you had invested it so securely that you were sure 
of support in your old age; and now it looks as if all you had 
would be swept away. 

As a human hen what will you do? You will brood over 
that egg of thought, fear of poverty, till it hatches in poverty for 
you, even though, later on, your investment proves to be safe. 
With your uprising and your downsitting you will be thinking 
" Oh! dear! what shall I do? I shall have to go to the poor- 
house! " — thinking this with every mouthful you eat, so that 
your food is poisoned for you; thinking it in the home and out 
of it wherever you are. whatever you are doing; brooding over 
that thought-egg, incubating it till in due season the chick ap- 
pears. 

You know, you have seen examples that prove it, that a man 
with ten thousand dollars may be much poorer than the man 
who has but ten dollars; for wealth and poverty are matters of 



36 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

feeling more than of objective possessions. Because you are a 
human incubator, you can live really in the poorhouse, though 
outwardly you have a home on Fifth Avenue. 

You will live, in either case, in the midst of the brood you 
hatch. You can spend your time in naming and counting your 
chickens, but it would be more profitable to spend it in careful 
selection of eggs. If you do not like some of your brood, see 
to it that you brood over no more such eggs. Careful selection 
of your thought-eggs is the requisite essential for desired result. 

It is your own fault if you are miserable in your anticipation 
of poverty. By this fear of and anticipation of it, brooding over 
your thought-eggs, you are really in poverty, because the poverty 
is in you; and when you are feeling poverty, wealth does not 
exist for you, even though you have a large balance at your 
banker's. 

Even though your friends say "His poverty is all in his 
mind; he imagines himself poor," you are poor as long as you 
feel poverty. You really experience it within yourself, for your 
imagination — your imaging power — makes your inner world. 
With that power you form your thought-eggs; as a human in- 
cubator you brood over them till they hatch for you either misery 
or joy, according to their kind. 

According to the Dictionary, incubation, in pathology, is 
"the unnoticed or unknown processes or changes which occur 
in the interval between the exposure to an infectious disease and 
the development of its first symptoms." 

This interval is your own brooding over your thought-eggs. 
Impression, natural tendency and impulse first determine your 
thought-egg. You form it, not understanding what you are 
doing, and brood over it till it hatches, till the " first symptoms " 
appear; and then you wonder where in the world that chicken 
came from. 

The atmosphere in an incubator must be kept warm for the 
eggs to hatch, and your fear and expectation supply the necessary 
heat. 

Though you may not like your present brood of chickens, 
they are good for you, for they are evidence of the kind of eg£S 
you have allowed yourself to brood over and hatch. They are 
proof that you can have another kind, if you will select another 
kind of egg. 

It is not your fault that you are a human hen. There is 
nothing wrong about that. On the contrary, it is a great privilege 
that goes with it — you are able to choose your eggs; and thereby 
you control results. 

Learn to see that every experience you have is evidence of 
your own natural tendencies, and that it may also be made op- 
portunity for evidence of your greater possibilities. 



. YOU LIVE IN YOUR THOUGHT-WORLD. 

" Care killed a cat " you know, and a cat has nine lives. 
If care can kill a creature that has nine lives, what will it do for 
a poor mortal who has but one? Finish him quite, I should 
think; should not you? 

Seriously, has not worry made more misery than any other 
one thing in the world? Oh, that haunting spectre of worry, 
standing beside one continually, poisoning food and drink, 
shutting out the light of day and compelling one to dwell in the 
dungeon of his own dire imaginings! 

What a bondage to live in, and how few know that it is a 
needless bondage! Perpetual worry is perpetual slavery, and 
women, especially, are so prone to worry. 

Do you plead guilty? Have you worried over what might 
happen till your nerves were " all unstrung " and the slightest 
unusual sound sent a pang of terror through you? 

This is what you have done. Your little son did not reach 
home from school at the usual time. Immediately you began 
to worry. You were sure that something had happened to him. 
He had been run over in crossing the street, probably. At once 
you saw his little form lying in the dust injured and suffering. 
Your heart leaped to your throat and choked you, you gasped 
for breath and were so weak you could scarcely drag yourself to 
the door to look for him. 

Though your feet were leaded your thought leaped forward 
to his probable injuries, the rush for the doctor, his long illness, 
his crippled condition in future, or even his death; yes, even 
to arrangements for the funeral; and all this in the moment or 
two that it took you to get to the door and look down the street, 
and see him in the distance trotting along all unmindful of his 
mother's misery. 

Then in the great rush of thankfulness that swept over you 
was mingled another element — for a moment you wanted to get 
hold of him and give him a good shaking for the fright he had 
caused you. 

And there was where you were unjust to your child and to 
your own better nature, for he had not caused your fright at all. 
It was your own tendency to worry, to imagine the worst, that 
caused it. Your own thoughts made your feet like lead and your 
heart beat madly. 

Your feelings were what you created for yourself by letting 



38 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

a tendency dominate you. What you pictured to yourself by 
your thoughts was what you saw and felt. Your thought-pict- 
ures scared you half to death. You gave yourself such a shock 
with them, made such a demand upon your stored-up energy, 
that the supply nearly gave out. 

Not understanding how to keep the channel between you 
and the inexhaustible reservoir open, you had so little left that 
you did not — as you yourself said — get over it for days. You 
knew neither how to avoid such a demand upon your stored-up 
energy nor how to renew your supply. You paid the penalty of 
your ignorance and then wanted to shake your dear little boy. 
You dropped in a heap on the doorstep, and when he finally 
reached you, you hugged and scolded him at the same time. 

Oh, yes! You can laugh at it now, but you did not feel 
much like laughing then. And though you laugh, you will do 
something quite as absurd again, unless you learn that thought 
is creative and that you must use it, if you do not wish it to use 
you. " Use, or be used " is the command of Nature. 

" But," you say, " your illustration does not apply to me. 
I have no children, and I am not prone to worry over possible 
accidents, or the health of any member of my family. My trouble 
is of a very different kind." 

Oh! yes! I see. Your case is quite different. You are wor- 
rying over what is to become of you in your old age when 
you are not able to provide for your needs. You thought you 
had laid by a sufficient sum and invested it securely, and now 
it has taken to itself wings and flown away — the investment has 
turned out badly. 

Now do you know that if you did not worry over that you 
would worry over something else ? You are fast getting to where 
you would be out of your element if you did not worry. It is 
becoming such a habit with you that you would be sure to find 
something to worry over, no matter what your circumstances 
might be. And such a pernicious habit as it is! It makes you 
have troubled dreams besides robbing you of all comfort and 
pleasure in your waking hours. 

You live in your thought-world. That is why you are so 
miserable. It is peopled by your fears and anticipations, and 
the population has multiplied till you are crowded and jostled 
on every side. And yet they are all ghosts, nothing but ghosts. 
5Tou have made every one of them, and you can withdraw the 
life from every one of them. If you do not keep them alive they 
must dwindle and fade out. They feed on you. They are so 
many vampires that suck your vitality into themselves. 

It is for you to say, Stop! You can go to work to make a 
new thought-world and fill it with angels instead. The law of 
being compels that you live in the midst of your own creations; 
for you are a living soul, you know, not a fleshly machine. 



YOU LIVE IN YOUR THOUGHT- WORLD. 39 

Therefore your thought-creations must become like unto the 
real of you, before you can see its beauty and feel its power. 

What do you say? You can not help worrying? Yes, you 
can! You have not tried in the right way, that is all. You 
have tried not to worry. You must do something instead of trying 
not to do something. 

You must think. You cannot help yourself. It is your 
nature as effect of cause. And when you try so hard not to think 
worry-thoughts, it is a great strain and effort and you get dis- 
couraged. You have only to think truth-thoughts persistently, 
and the worry-thoughts will take their departure because their 
vitality is withdrawn. The ghosts will vanish, the vampires die 
of starvation. 

To do, is much better than to try not to do. Never allow 
yourself to brood over a disagreeable thought-egg. Get off from 
the nest as quickly as you can. Go and do something; sing, 
dance, run up and down stairs a few times and keep thinking 
hard — " I have nothing to worry about. God is my supply and 
I can not lack." 

Never let yourself sit down and brood over the disagree- 
able. You will not change the population of your thought- 
world that way; and if you want it to be bright, sunny, and 
wholesome, you must make it so. Thoughts that are in accord 
with your true being are God's messengers who bring to you that 
fullness of health, strength, and peace that is your birthright. 
By their help you take possession of all that pertains to the 
eternal real of you, and embody it. 

Then you make manifest your true God-being, glorifying 
the flesh. There is no dominion manifest in perpetual worry, 
except the dominion that your thoughts have over you. Your 
higher dominion is shown by your control of your thoughts; and 
the way to control them is to keep pegging away on the positive, 
afnrmatory side. 

When you worry you are negative and therefore passive to 
all impressions from the universal thought-atmosphere that are 
of the same kind. You attract what you think. Because this law 
holds good on the one side as well as the other, you will attract 
supply for your needs when you persist in the affirmative thought. 
Persisting in the negative or worry-thoughts, your tendency will 
be to experience them later on. 

If you could once get a good square look at your thought- 
world, and knew that you had created what it contains, you 
would lose no time, but set yourself to work at once to change 
its inhabitants. There are no more forlorn or despicable creat- 
ures in the external world than you will find there; and when 
you constitute yourself the sanitary officer, physician, and priest 
of the community, you will redeem that world from defilement 
and darkness and reconcile it — bring it into accord with — God. 



40 HOW TO CONTEOL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

This you can do by your use of the same thought-force 
that has used you in making this world. By your use of it you 
remake your thought-world, make it into the likeness of God. 
You dwell in heaven or in hell according to your thought- 
world, not acording to outward circumstances; and this world 
is under your control through your power to change it. 

No matter what your fate may be, knowledge of your des- 
tiny and right use of thought-force will enable you to conquer 
it. You can reach that poise and equilibrium where no com- 
bination of circumstances can appall you, because you see the 
line of destiny that runs through them and brings a triumph 
over them at last. 

Suppose you do have to leave your handsome house and live 
in a small one in an unfashionable neighborhood. What of it? 
The house and street belong only to the world you look at 
through the natural channel, the senses. This is not the world 
you live in. Though you look upon what appears to you as an 
external world, you are living in your thought- world all the time, 
and your feelings are according to that inner world. 

That poor, mean, unfashionable house has no power to make 
you miserable. It is your thoughts about it that make you mis- 
erable, and you can be just as happy there as you choose to be. 
The external world never did nor never can make happiness or 
misery for you. It is your own attitude toward it, made into a 
mental environment, that constitutes your happiness or misery, 
your fate or your destiny. 

Be glad that you are finding out what it is to be an individ- 
ual even if the knowledge, and the power born of it, cost you 
something. Be glad that you can leave behind self after self as 
only " stepping stones to higher things/' 

As the individual you will see and live by destiny, not fate; 
and then the fate you thought so hard and bitter will take care 
of itself. See that you have the glorious privilege of proving 
by use the great creative power that is the mainspring of every- 
thing that lives and moves. Though naturally you have been 
used, all the while within you was the possibility to use; and 
experience has brought you to where you can exercise your pos- 
sibility, and bring it to bear upon what you are now, naturally. 

You have glorious opportunity to prove your own latent 
power, and you had to be pushed to where you would stretch 
forth your hand to lay hold upon the possible. Therefore it is 
all good from beginning to end, for though naturally servant, 
you are to become master. 

The mastery of fate is gained by attention to the thought- 
world, and worry is removed in the same way. Set up a counter- 
acting tendency and eventually the victory is yours. 



THE PAKALYSIS OF FEAK. 

Have you ever observed the paralyzing effects of fear? A 
sudden fright makes your heart thump, your throat contract, 
your voice fail, and a tremor possesses you from head to foot. 
Your strength goes on the instant, and a deadly weakness assails 
you at the moment you are without power of resistance; a slight 
push would overthrow you. Did you ever think of what the 
effect of long-continued fear must be? 

Is anything more common than fear? Is any one phrase 
repeated more often than, " I am afraid " ? "We are afraid that 
it will rain or grow cold; that we will be disappointed; that 
something will happen; that we shall take cold, or be ill in some 
form; afraid that our children and friends will be ill or un- 
happy; that we shall not be prosperous; that some one will do 
something that will reflect discreditably upon us, and so on ad 
infinitum. 

Natural existence is one constant long-drawn-out fear, as 
the undercurrent moving steadily along, whatever may be on the 
surface at the moment. We are born in fear and surrounded by 
fear, adding our own to the common stock, when we begin to be 
a unit in the community. To fear is a tendency strengthened by 
frequent repetition, till it is ever present in daily life, and we 
are unconsciously in bondage in consequence. We are always 
more or less expectant of something painful; we draw scarcely 
a free breath. We are shut in and bound about with bonds, 
the stronger for being invisible. Under ordinary circumstances 
we do not notice them, but in an extremity we call upon God 
to free us. 

However fearless outwardly one may be, no one is really 
free from fear, till he has gained some insight into his nature 
and destiny. It cannot be otherwise. Sense-knowledge fosters 
fear; wisdom begets fearlessness. Fear increases susceptibility 
to suffering; fearlessness decreases this susceptibility. It fol- 
lows, therefore, that wisdom is to be sought and found before 
liability to the undesirable is diminished; hence that the remedy 
for all ills is to be individually obtained. 

Whatever tends to allay fear tends to alleviate suffering. 
Whatever tends to the extermination of fear tends to the ex- 



42 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

termination of suffering. Now which do yon desire? Allevia- 
tion or extermination? 

You can get alleviation more easily than extermination, 
but you will simply increase the amount of work you must event- 
ually do. The fear of suffering is natural, and whatever offers 
even a temporary help is eagerly grasped; but you may purchase 
present relief at the expense of future misery. Enlightenment 
is the only sound basis for extermination of the root-cause of 
all suffering — ignorance and fear. 

You do not like to be called a coward? No one is calling 
you a coward. The bravest soldier that ever faced shot and shell 
is afraid, down deep within him, as you, as all are afraid; for 
this fear is a natural characteristic of human nature. The ques- 
tion of susceptibility to disease is a puzzling question for all 
physicians to deal with. Ask your own and see if this is not so. 

Why are we susceptible to disease? Beyond reference to 
natural tendencies, heredity, etc., they cannot tell you. But the 
Science of Being shows that it is because of natural, latent fear, 
quickened and intensified by ignorance of what we are and our 
relation to Nature. Fear is born of ignorance, and ignorance is 
natural. 

You — this personal you — are an existent soul. As an ap- 
ple-blossom on the tree must precede the fruit, you, as you are 
naturally, must precede what you may become. First the nat- 
ural, afterward the possible. 

As this natural personal you, you are immersed in an ocean 
of thought-atmosphere which you are unconsciously inbreath- 
ing and outbreathing. It is full of germs — the thoughts of the 
human race from the dawn of time. You inhale them, and some 
of them remain in you and germinate, begetting their kind. 
What you attract, sticks to you. Fear makes you passive instead 
of resistant. Instead of outbreathing the germs, you hold them 
to yourself. Your inbreathing is strong, for it is natural; your 
outbreathing is feeble through your ignorance and fear. 

By understanding what you are in the real of you, which 
is so much more than the personal you, you can make your out- 
breathing strong enough to expel the germs, instead of retaining 
them. You can, through cultivation, offer that resistance that 
will prevent them from germinating in their passage through 
you. You will never stand free from the liability to dis-ease, to 
suffering, till you cultivate resistance to it and undertake the 
work of extermination of its root-cause. 

You will never be sure of healthfulness, of the fulness of 
harmonious consciousness that is possible, till you have freed 
yourself from the bondage of natural fear and thereby removed 
your susceptibility to suffering. The degree of susceptibility al- 
ways determines the measure of suffering. Lessening of suscep- 
tibility must, then, lessen the suffering. 



THE PARALYSIS OF FEAE. 43 

Now it remains to determine whether or not natural sus- 
ceptibility is capable of control. What are you? An automaton 
or a machine? Machines do not love or hate. They break down, 
but do not weep over their own wreckage. You feel, and you 
express what you feeL You are more than a machine. You are 
a living soul rooted in your God-being, and you are to grow to 
maturity through experience. First you experience that sus- 
ceptibility to impression — experience it by its consequences — 
that is natural, because it belongs to the infancy of self -con- 
sciousness. 

You, as the living soul, are an infant in knowledge of your 
being. How can a baby recognize and bring to bear upon sensa- 
tion the faculties and powers of God-being? The consequences 
of what you are naturally as a living soul make the demand upon 
you that quickens them to action and brings you out of infancy 
into manhood, when you use them to that end. 

So, you see, your ignorance and fear stand between natural 
susceptibility and possible freedom from it. You pay a debt to 
Nature and the paying process is a hard one; but you may, if you 
will, amass a fortune which you will righteously keep as your 
own. The foundation of this fortune — health, strength, power, 
and peace — is fearlessness through understanding your original 
and destined relation to God and Nature. 

The air is full of miasma say you? You — the real of you — 
are greater than miasma. The water is full of germs? You are 
greater than they. You have inherited a tendency to consump- 
tion? You are vastly greater and more powerful than any ten- 
dency. You have lost all your friends and all interest in life 
and do not care how soon the end comes? You are more than 
these friends and this state of existence, and its end is but the 
beginning of another. 

Now you might as well face the music. The only way out of 
suffering is by extermination of its cause. Alleviation, whatever 
the means employed, is only postponement. Extermination can 
be achieved only through your effort to supplant the natural with 
the possible; only by your effort to think and live according to 
your being instead of according to your natural sense. 

Were it not for your natural susceptibility you would not 
know your own power of dominion, for there would be nothing 
over which to exercise and thereby prove it. Were it not for your 
suffering, there would be no incentive for you to cultivate re- 
sistance to it. 

Susceptibility is good, suffering is good, experience is good; 
fear is the devil. He goes to and fro in the world seeking whom 
he may devour; and they are many. He has very nearly de- 
voured you for he paralyzed you so that you did not resist what 
you are capable of resisting when you know the capabilities of 
God-being. 



44 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

Get up above the level of your pains and pangs and look 
down upon them from this height. He may stand there too, but 
a step below you, for the mountain-peak affords standing room 
for but one. Answer each and all his utterances according to 
your original God-likeness. That never changes whatever he 
shows you. 

The ministration of angels will be yours when his presence 
does not keep them away. You will be fed and sustained in the 
position you have taken. From the Father's house will be 
brought to you daily supply for daily needs. There is enough 
there. The supply can never be exhausted and yours is your 
birthright which will never be denied, except by yourself. Act 
upon it. Claim what is for you, what has always been for you, 
waiting appropriation. 

" God and one are a majority." However multitudinous 
your miseries, that majority will always achieve victory over 
them. Do not mark a date in your calendar as the time when the 
work shall be successfully accomplished. Let dates alone. It 
will be done. Let this suffice you. Do your part and leave the 
rest. 

When you plant a seed in the ground do you demand the 
blossom the next hour ? You know that having planted the seed 
— your part — a process of growth sets in which unlocks and 
brings forth to manifestation the potencies hidden in the seed. 
You know that the order is sure and on that basis you trust the 
result. 

Your faith has under it a foundation which will not sink 
out of sight at the first heavy weight placed upon it. You will 
be able to wait for the blossoming period without for one mo- 
ment abandoning your trust. The possible does not supplant the 
natural in a day, but it does supplant. 

The blossom appears where the seed has been — in your 
hand. And all the while, before the seed and after the blossom, 
you are you. The eternal is incapable of annihilation. What is 
there to fear? All that belongs to time passes and is not. You 
remain. 

A shadow passes before your eyes and is gone. 



THE LIVING BRIDGE. 

There is a grieved look in your face, your eyes are moist, 
and your heart is heavy. You are wrestling with one of the prob- 
lems of human existence. One whom you called your friend 
has wounded you so deeply that, although the blow was given 
days and weeks ago, the pain is still sore and you can not speak 
of it, you can only do your best to hide it. 

He misjudged you, attributed to you a motive which you 
did not feel and judged your actions by that standard. The 
shock was so great, at first, that you could not reason, you could 
only feel. You were stunned by it, for you thought that you 
knew him and that he knew you; and had any one told you that 
he would have so judged you, you would have said " Impossible! " 

Then as the hurt grew stronger your constant thought was 
" How could he do it? How could he? " and looking at him you 
saw one whom you had never known. Your old friend was gone 
and a stranger was in his place, a stranger who looked at you 
through eyes that had lost the loving-kindness you had been used 
to see there. 

You could make no defense, not because there was none to 
be made but because you could make none to Mm. Did he not 
know you better? If he could misjudge you so cruelly what was 
there to be said? Was it worth while? The mistaken opinion 
you could bear, but that he should be the one to utter it was the 
crushing blow. 

It is no wonder that your eyes are moist and your heart 
heavy, and yet — and yet . You need the help of under- 
standing, not simply why he judged you as he did, but the under- 
standing of what and why existence is. All problems must be 
solved — to be solved at all — according to their principle. This 
circumstance, like all circumstances that make up your experi- 
ence, is part of what is good for you though very evil to you. 

Suppose that you were on one side of a river, with a need 
and a desire for what was on the other side; that you were com- 
pelled to get to that other side some day. A bridge would be a 
help adapted to your needs. Eesting upon either shore and 
spanning the stream it would be, for you, a means to the in- 
evitable end. 



46 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

But as you attempted to walk over it you might find the 
way hard, because of the construction of the bridge. You might 
have to climb over obstacles, find a wall across your path that 
you could not climb over but must dig under, some steps that 
led down into a dark pit of which you could not see the bottom, 
or up an inclined plane where you continually slipped back. 

As you met these impediments tc your progress, you would 
either give up your effort to cross the river as useless, or over- 
come them with great difficulty. If you ceased effort, you would 
find yourself compelled to renew it after a time; the continued 
effort to move forward in spite of all obstacles would set you 
further along your way, no matter how small your measure of 
progress might be at a given moment. 

Unless it was inevitable that you must reach the other side 
of the river, there would be no object in encountering these ob- 
stacles and aiming to conquer them. If there was any other and 
easier way of reaching it, there would be equally no object. Only 
necessity for reaching the opposite shore, and the bridge as the 
only means for it, would spur you to continued effort; and only 
continued effort would yield continual progress. 

Suppose that your own effort, when you encountered your 
first obstacle, developed a strength in you, that helped you to 
overcome the second one, when you reached it; that the strength 
necessary for reaching the other shore was gained only in this 
way. Then these very obstacles, due to the construction of the 
bridge, would be a means of reaching that shore. 

In this case not only would the bridge as such be necessary, 
but its construction, hard as that would be for you to meet and 
master, would be equally necessary; and the wall, the pit, and 
the inclined plane would be your good friends, though appearing 
to you in the guise of enemies. Wrestling with them you would 
say, " Let this obstacle be taken away from before me. It is too 
much for me. I can not bear it." And if you were told, " Over- 
come it: you are able," you would feel that too much was 
asked of you. 

But as you gained even a measure of success, you would 
see that only trial advanced you in the desired direction, and that 
the means of your trial was good and necessary. Your enemies 
would disappear, and friends would stand in their places; but 
previous to this, as one of the obstacles in the way, a fellow- 
traveler, whom you had revered as a friend, might assume the 
guise of an enemy. When you had looked for his approbation, 
} r ou received disapprobation and even condemnation. You were 
all wrong, he told you; you should do this, and you should not 
do that, and his words cut like a knife. 

By the help of this illustration try to see your present ex- 
istence as a bridge between two states, the link that preserves 
continuity of existence. Your present is one shore, your future 



THE LIVING BRIDGE. 47 

the other. Your present is what you are, as a living soul, now; 
your future is what you, as such, will become. The bridge is 
your becoming; the inevitable and only bridge that lies between 
present facts and future possibilities. 

Places, people, and things do not make you what you are. 
You make them what they are by your need of them. They be- 
long to the construction, and as the bridge is good for you and 
necessary to what you must reach, all that belongs to its con- 
struction is good and necessary. It is all a means to an end, an 
end compelled by what you are in being, and by the order of 
development from that being. 

You, as a living soul, come into existence from that being 
without knowing it, but with potentiality for knowing it. Be- 
cause of the fundamental relation between being and soul, the 
destiny which an existing soul must fulfil is to find that being 
from which it springs. Existence for you, and for all, is this 
finding — finding and knowing the source of existence by proving, 
through experience, its nature. 

Hence existence is a becoming, continuous though difficult, 
winding, and tortuous to the traveler over the bridge. You have 
only met one of the obstacles that belong to the bridge. You 
have met others and with a measure of success. This is one you 
did not anticipate, but think back a little and see if you antici- 
pated the others. 

This is not the first surprise you have had. The bridge is 
full of surprises; its nature compels. Each surprise is more or 
less of a shock to you, and these shocks are necessary to bring out 
of you what you have not known was there — your own power of 
resistance to obstacles. 

But this is such a terrible shock, you plead; you were so 
utterly unprepared for it. You had perfect confidence in your 
friend, and whatever the appearance you would not have mis- 
judged him. You thought this confidence was mutual, and you 
would not have believed that he could so wrong you. 

Yes, there is blood on the bridge, the blood of the heart 
whose wounds are a part of the price paid for the strength to 
cross it. Look at the Great Example, see the marks of cruci- 
fixion, hands, feet, and heart; and the wound in the heart is 
last and deepest of all. We become able to bear crucifixion in 
small things, but crucifixion of the heart! There our strength 
fails us, fails us for a time during which we moan in pain. The 
footprints along the rest of the bridge are marked by the blood 
that tells its own story, yet the Via Dolorosa becomes the way 
for the triumphant journey of the king. 

You are able to bear other things, but not this? 

You are able to meet and conquer even this. Cross the 
bridge you must, and you are God-endowed to this end. In you, 
way down deep in you as the hidden source of a living spring, 



48 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

is a power which is of your original likeness to God. It is en- 
tombed in your sense-consciousness. It can come forth trium- 
phant from this tomb only by your help. You must call it forth. 
Your experiences, of which this instance is one, are what impel 
you to do, finally, what is necessary for resurrection from that 
tomb. The pain makes you call with a loud voice, rolling the 
stone from the door; and that dead comes forth alive, ready to 
sit at table with you, when you have loosed the grave-clothes 
of old habits and feelings that bind him round about. 

You do not know of what you are capable, till you prove 
your capability. Your capability can be proved only through 
something that challenges it. Opportunity for proof is your 
bridge, the living bridge of existence, and its construction is 
according to human needs. 

The bridge is alike for all, and yet individual. At the same 
time one is at the pit, another at the wall, another at the inclined 
plane; but all enter upon the bridge and leave it by the same 
door. Nature and her order are what all must follow, but yours 
and mine is the choice as to what that order shall be to us. The 
sorrowful way becomes the triumphal way when we learn how 
to master fate with destiny. 

It is your fate to meet the wall, the pit, and the inclined 
plane, and contend with them. It is your destiny to conquer 
them, and by means of that power which you, sometimes, call 
upon. When you have labored long in vain with the strength of 
your sense-self, you will call forth and use the strength of your 
God-self; and then, strong in the recognition of your destiny, 
you will fearlessly meet and conquer fate. 

Your friend is still your friend, for though he has mis- 
judged you, he has spoken as you appeared to him. We do not 
know how we appear to others till such occurrences act as a 
mirror. Strong in your intention to do what was right and best 
to you, you can understand his judgment as according to what 
was not right and best to him; and his condemnation as blindness 
to your motive. Then you, in your turn, will judge righteous 
judgment, returning good for his evil; for you do not expect 
him to see with his eyes closed what another sees who has his 
eyes open. 

Find your consolation in your motive for the action he has 
condemned, and return him loving charity for his condemnation 
of your motive and purpose. This act, which has hurt you so 
sorely, will serve to make you stronger because of the demand 
it makes upon your resources; and he, not you, will be punished 
by it, because he has weakened his own power of resistance to 
impression. He has placed an obstacle of his own making in his 
way, in addition to what naturally pertains to the construction 
of the bridge. 



THE POWEE OF IMPEESSIOK 

You are just recovering •from a bad attack of " the blues," 
are you? And the sympathy of your friends is very grateful and 
soothing, is it not? 

Of course you are entitled to it, for yours is a case of " con- 
stitutional blues," and you must submit whenever the "fit" 
comes upon you. You regret that the family is made uncom- 
fortable, that you find yourself unable to speak a cheery word, 
but must mope and poke about the house with no life in your 
step and with your face like the darkest side of a dark cloud. 

yes! You are very sorry that your presence should be a 
kill- joy, but you cannot possibly help being blue; and if people 
only knew, as they never, never can, what you suffer! 

This is the way you reason, and will probably continue 
to reason, till you begin to get your eyes open to your 
own selfishness, because as far back as you can remember, 
you have "been subject to fits of the blues." But the 
truth of the matter is that you are subject to your own self- 
indulgence, instead. You are your own jailer, holding your own 
power behind the bars of ignorance, shackling it with the opin- 
ions and feelings born of natural tendency and the education 
based on a wrong premise. You are the prisoner, not the free 
man that you might be, did you seek to learn instead of to feel. 
You are living in your sensation, yielding to it and cultivating 
it by yielding, when you might establish dominion over it, if you 
chose. 

There is a way of gaining dominion over our sensations, but 
it must be sought to be found; and you have not been seeking it, 
even though you have wished, again and again, that you could 
be rid forever of the blues. You have not been truly seeking 
it, because you have not looked in the right direction. You 
have looked out of yourself instead of into yourself, and have 
feebly wished, instead of vigorously acted, as is necessary. 

You need self-knowledge even more than knowledge of the 
things you see — geology, botany, astronomy, etc., and when you 
have self-knowledge these will yield you far richer treasures 
than before. You need to know what you are, as well as how 
you feel, and to know God by proving your own God-like power. 

Good as it is to believe in God, it is better to know God; 
and this knowing must be individually sought and found. 



50 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

Neither book nor priest can make you know God. If they are 
kept in their true place, they can but help you to that finding, 
that will bring you at last to " the Father's house." 

Are you ready for self-knowledge? Are you prepared to 
get away from your sensation long enough to see interiorly what 
may be held before your inner eye ? Moses, you remember, lifted 
up the serpent in the wilderness and all who looked upon it, 
lived. If you will look upon what may be held up before you, 
long enough for it to make impression upon you, you, too, may 
live more truly and abundantly than ever before. 

Till now you have not half lived. You have existed, but 
the bounding life that fills all things according to their capacity 
has filled only the tiny pint cup that you have been, not the 
overflowing measure that you might be. 

Have you found out that you are a living soul, not a flesh- 
body? 

Why, of course! Everyone knows that. 

Do they? They may know it theoretically, but do they, 
do you, prove it practically? It is the proof that changes you, 
enlarges your capacity, not the theory. 

As a living soul it is natural to you to be impressionable. 
This is your outer nature, that which is in contact with external 
Nature. On this outer side you receive impression from external 
objects — they seem external to us though they are really 
bounded by consciousness. 

You also receive deeper impression from the ideas you habit- 
ually carry with you. The thought you habitually hold impresses 
itself upon you, because of your natural susceptibility to impres- 
sion, till you practically become it. This is a natural consequence 
of what you are as a living soul rooted in the being that is the 
changeless identity; changeless through all this variety of sen- 
sation that we call existence. 

But there is also a possible consequence of what you are 
as such. Because of your natural susceptibility to impression, 
because of the great truth of individuality, you can make im- 
pression on your own soul, on yourself, thus using the natural 
fact as a means toward your own power over the natural. It is 
natural that you are impressionable. It is equally natural that 
you can impress. 

Put these two facts together, and what do you get? Add 
still the third fact that you feel the impression, that it becomes 
you, practically, and what is the sum of these facts? The sum 
is dominion; for if you are susceptible to impression; if the 
impression made on you as a living soul is what you feel as you; 
if you can impress yourself, it follows logically that you, by virtue 
of your individuality, can supplant one impression by another; 
and that, consequently, you are not obliged to remain subject to 
blues unless you choose to. 



THE POWER OF IMPRESSION. 51 

The power of individuality over natural susceptibility and 
tendency, is the great truth, the gospel of glad tidings at the 
close of this nineteenth century, promising for the twentieth 
a higher, nobler, better race of men and women. " I cannot help 
it " is to become an obsolete expression, for it is the utterance 
of that incapacity that is removable through applied self-knowl- 
edge. 

Adding demonstrable facts together, we arrive at possible 
truth, which becomes practically, as well as theoretically, true 
to us when we apply the knowledge gained to our own conditions 
and circumstances. You are dwelling in the valley of your pos- 
sibilities, when you might dwell on their summit. You are en- 
folded with the mists and fogs of the valley, when you might 
revel in the clear sunlight of the mountain top. 

Look to your addition. The factors for the successful 
working of your problem are all at hand. Those that the prob- 
lem involves are eternally ready. You as the seeker for its solu- 
tion have to become ready. Then the self-knowledge which, 
applied, will solve the problem, may also be found at hand, for 
it is never without a witness, a John the Baptist, in the world. 

Work according to the rule of addition. Even though you 
are naturally subject to depression, add to that fact your natural 
susceptibility to all impression, and to that your own power to 
impress, and you have as the answer to your life-problem, " I, 
because of what I am in my real being, can impress upon my 
own soul what I will, overruling what has been unconsciously 
impressed; and, as I feel my impressions, I shall feel dominion 
over, instead of subjection to, blues, when I have impressed this 
dominion forcibly enough upon myself to supplant the old im- 
pression." 

In this way you can " help it," and the sooner you get to 
work, the better. When you care more for self-mastery than 
you do for self-indulgence; when the mixed joys and miseries 
of existence have quickened in you the god that lies sleeping, 
he will awake from slumber and assert that higher manhood 
which is his birthright — his right through relation to Origin. 
He will refuse to be lulled longer by the sedative — " I cannot 
help it." " I can and will help it. Depart from me! " he will say. 

How can one help being depressed when things go wrong? 
When one sees so much misery that one is unable to relieve, so 
much evil and sorrow one is unable to remove? 

You, and everyone, can help it in just the way pointed out 
to you, and you will not follow in this way half-heartedly when 
you see — Moses lifts it up before you — that all the evil is inci- 
dental to the Soul's voyage of discovery. It belongs neither 
to the port from which it sails nor the one which it enters as 
a final harbor; therefore, the final port is not made while the 
evil is before the vision. Each soul is making the one voyage 



52 HOW TO CONTEOL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

whether steering its course by your compass or not. If your 
compass is the best, the voyage of others is prolonged when it 
might be shortened; but each is somewhere between the two 
ports. 

Let this comfort you and strengthen you to make your own 
efforts to set free the god in you. When he takes charge of the 
voyage all the rest follows as a matter of certainty. 

Learn to add, for he works according to mathematical ac- 
curacy. Add your power as the individual to the tendency 
God-ward which his presence in you affords, and your ten- 
dency to the blues must dwindle and fade away. The stronger 
supplants the weaker. So it has always been, and so it always 
will be. At any moment of existence you can " turn from death 
unto life"; turn from a tendency, that, however strong, is 
doomed by its very nature to death, to a tendency that, also by 
its very nature, is bound to grow stronger and stronger. 

But the tendency, on either side, is one thing, and you are 
another. It is you who turn, not it. You have power of choice, 
it chooses nothing. It simply acts according to its nature. You 
can refrain from acting according to one nature and can volun- 
tarily act according to another. 

" Blues " is only the mental dwelling upon subjective pict- 
ures that grow more real the longer you look at them. The 
remedy is, make a picture that will benefit you while you look 
at it. Use the very possibility that has used you. It has used 
you as the means of manifesting its power. Use it as the means 
of manifesting your power — the power of the soul that has 
found its own individuality. 

The weaknesses of human nature have found you. Find 
the strength of the higher nature and rule them. You are able 
to do this, if you will. Have you not yet suffered enough to 
make your beginning? 

The beginning of your own effort is the first step in your 
redemption from suffering. Like the child learning to walk your 
first efforts may be feeble in immediate result, but they will be 
oh, so potent, for the ultimate result. The feet that first seem 
so aimless will walk steadily and run surely as the effort to use 
them continues. Development is life, cessation of effort is death. 

Keep on trying to conquer your natural tendency. It is 
a means to an end, the means by which you will prove what is 
possible to you. The natural is only the means of calling out 
and establishing this possible. 



HAUNTED BY GHOSTS. 

You are one of the many who are ghost-ridden, and your 
ghost is the fear of death. Wherever you go, he is with you. When 
you are the happiest is when he makes his presence felt the most 
forcibly. Just when everything is according to your desires and 
you are congratulating yourself upon your good fortune, his 
chill breath freezes you and his clutch almost paralyzes you. 
" What if I should die? " you mentally gasp, and a sickening fear 
of what lies beyond excludes all else for the moment. 

Fear always accompanies ignorance. You are ignorant of 
the nature of " here " and consequently can have no knowledge 
of " there." If you knew more of what and where you are now, 
you would have an approximate knowledge of what and where 
you would be then. 

Look at your hand. It is yours, and you use it, but it could 
be amputated and you would still think, hope, and feel. Both 
hands could be spared and this would still be the case. Both 
hands and both feet could mingle with the dust and you would 
continue to suffer and enjoy, to plan and reason. Sections of your 
body above hands and feet could follow into the invisible, and 
you would still be entitled to the rights of citizenship. 

How is this? If the body is the man, in this case but half a 
man is left — half a citizen. If the citizen is still complete, the 
man is complete. If the man is complete, his body is not he. If 
his body is not he, its destruction cannot make him incomplete, 
or less than he was when he had and used it. If some members 
of the body can be spared without impairing the man, the infer- 
ence that the disappearance of the whole body would not impair 
the man is warranted. 

But, you say, " we have no evidence that the loss of the whole 
body does not affect the man. This is speculation." 

What is speculation? Thinking apart from, or contrary to, 
the evidence of your senses, you say. 

Did you ever sit in a railway car in the station — of course 
you have — beside a train of cars on another track, and, looking 
from the window, say, " We are moving " ? You thought the car 
you were in was moving — you had the evidence of your senses — 
when it was the other train that was moving. Your car was 
stationary. 



54 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

" What I see, I know " you are accustomed to say. What 
you see is what you do not know, in the sense of understanding 
it. It is what you believe in from the basis of appearance. Sense- 
evidence is one thing, reliable evidence is quite another. 

" When I see a man put his hand in another man's pocket 
and abstract his pocket-book, I know that man is a thief," say 
you? You believe, you do not know that man is a thief, and be- 
cause you are judging according to appearance — sense-evidence. 
He may have laid a wager with the other that he could pick the 
other's pocket undetected. In this case he would be no thief. 
Even our municipal law recognizes motive and intent, or the lack 
of them, in the perpetration of an act. The evidence submitted 
in a court of law must be metaphysical as well as physical. 

Do not be too sure of your evidence when it is of this kind — 
sense-evidence. And this is all the evidence you have of what 
death is, till you set yourself to work to find another kind. Yes- 
terday you saw the man, to-day he is dead, in the to-morrow his 
body mingles with the common dust; and that is the end of him 
acording to sense-evidence. 

But whether or no " that is the end of him " depends, not on 
what you see, but upon what he is as a man. If the man is as 
complete after all these sections of his body are removed as he was 
before, then his body is not he; and if not he, the removal of the 
whole body may still leave him intact. 

The senses cannot reveal the nature and destiny of man. 
They can recognize only what is recorded in his flesh-body — the 
handwriting on the wall; and they will even misread that. Not 
till faculties act with the senses, supplementing their limitations, 
can his nature and destiny be seen. You see more truly with 
your faculties than with your senses, if you only knew it; but 
you have been looking through your senses so persistently, you 
have not developed your faculties. If you had, you would not be 
afraid of death. 

Your hands and 3'our feet are your possessions, they are not 
you. A change can take place in your possessions without being 
a change in you. You are the same man if you have a thousand 
dollars or if } t ou have none. There is difference in your feeling 
— probably — but not change in you as a man. Your body being 
your possession, change in you does not necessarily follow change 
in, or loss of, it. 

If this is true, that amputation of your whole visible body 
that is called death will not change the thinking vou, your ability 
to think and feel. Your brain not being the thinker but only 
that part of your possessions that registers his thoughts, its loss 
will prevent that registration in a physical body, but not the 
destruction of the power to think them. 

See this difference and you will see that your survival of your 
physical body does not depend upou it, but upon what you are as 



HAUNTED BY GHOSTS. 55 

that living something that uses the body. What follows? To- 
day, now, while using that possession, your physical body, your 
feeling constitutes your happiness or misery. If the thinking 
you is complete apart from that body, and survives the wholesale 
amputation, you will still feel, and, therefore, enjoy or suffer. 
Your capacity for feeling must remain unchanged, though what 
you feel cannot be recognized by your remaining friends because 
you have no longer a body that they can see. That amputation 
makes you invisible to them, therefore they do not follow, from 
the basis of sense-evidence, your subsequent career. 

Are you afraid of what you are now ? Of where you are now ? 
If not, you need not be afraid of what and where you are then, 
and you can be sure that you will continue to exist. But of this 
you may also be sure : as you need to become better than you are 
now, so you will then need to become better and better; for this 
necessity is inherent in your nature. 

A part of your fear of death is due to the teaching you have 
received and to your own confounding of condition with locality. 
You have been taught that you were wicked, that God was angry 
with the wicked, and that you would surely suffer in the place of 
torment after death for the deeds done in the body. While this 
is true in one sense, it is untrue in another. 

There is a place of torment after death, because the feeling 
you survives death and continues to have experience in which the 
results of former acts are encountered. To see that you might 
have done better and what you have lost by doing as you have, 
is a place or condition of torment prepared for you by the law of 
cause and effect. But this law makes you the punisher as well as 
the redeemer of yourself, and you need fear no wrathful God. 

What the law brings to you, while you are ignorant of it and 
its working, prepares you for what it will bring for you when you 
know how to use it; and your torment fits you for mastery of the 
conditions that cause it. As you are in torment now while you 
have a physical body, if you prepare torment for yourself, so you 
will be then; no more and no less. And yours is the power of 
emancipation from suffering by ceasing to create the conditions 
that cause it. There is no hell other than in yourself — your own 
condition. Heaven and hell are side by side. 

Do you remember when you were a small child and your 
mother tied you to the stair-rail with a clothes-line, leaving you 
free to run as far as the line permitted, but preventing you from 
wandering out of her sight? And how sometimes you would suc- 
ceed in untying the knot and scamper away, when for a long time 
she could not find you? 

Your flesh body is not you, but what you are tied to in the 
childhood of self -consciousness. Sometime, not realizing how or 
why you do it — unless you have become wise — you will untie the 
knot, or cut it, and depart from the sight of your friends. And 



56 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

you will enjoy a kind of consequent freedom without, however, 
failing to experience what you have prepared for yourself. 

See that " before death " and " after death " consti- 
tute one continuous " now," in which is the incident of loosing 
the clothes-line — the " silver cord " that.connects you with that 
house, your physical body. You are not the house, you are at- 
tached to the house, and you will become detached from it, having 
a wider area to roam in, but under the same necessity for gaining 
understanding of the nature and destiny of man that you were 
under before. 

Clothed with the flesh, you see the flesh. Hence you see 
others, and they see you. Unclothed, you will not see others as 
you see them now, and they will not see you. But you will still 
see; your powers do not belong to the physical body. The power 
to see is in you, but while you use a physical body you see through 
that body. Afterward, you see without it. 

In your dreams at night your physical eye is fast closed; but 
you see, and remember what you see. Then, what you see and 
do is, in large measure, independent of your physical body; and 
by this experience you may understand the life after death to be 
the continuation of what you are before it, but without the flesh- 
body that is now so active. Do you miss that body in your 
dreams ? You seem to yourself quite complete, do you not ? But 
your eye is closed, your feet and hands are still; and yet you 
walk, talk, enjoy and experience pain. 

With you are opportunities; in you are possibilities. Your 
hereafter will be, always, what you make by the union of the two. 
So great is your own power that you need fear neither God nor 
devil. So dense is your, and all men's, natural ignorance of it, 
that you do fear, anything and everything, and live for years a 
ghost-haunted man. Inherently capable of becoming a god, you 
become, instead, a prey to all manner of surmises and happenings. 

Put them from you. Shake off the weight that oppresses 
you and step out into the sunlight of self-knowledge, a free man. 
Xot all the forces of the universe can extinguish you. They can 
make you smart, will make you smart, so long as you need that 
incentive to find yourself. 

God is Love. What should you fear outside yourself? 
Death may be to you a lifting of one veil and the drawing of an- 
other; that is all. Veil upon veil may be raised and lowered, and, 
through it all, you are you. Identity remains. It stands for a 
time before a veil and then passes behind it. 

You shall neither fear nor court death. You shall be ready 
for it by " dying daily." When you look at the sun you say, " it 
sets." When you are the sun you say, "Behold, I am here," 
though others say " it has set/ 3 



THE TIME EOE YTEAXEYG. 

Kememberini- that the physical world and its processes are 

representative of the greater invisible world and its processes., 
let us see if we cannot find an explanation of some of the puzzles 
that bese: you in tout efforts tc understand existence and your 
relation to it. 

A measure of understanding is necessary for the mastery 
of conditions and circumstances that you desire, a measure that 
increases as you make effort to live according to it. 

An infant is provided by nature with the food it needs. 
It is not obliged to procure its food for itself. Its mothers 
breast is ready and waiting, and from this source it draws its 
daily supply. The collective causes that have brought the in- 
fant bring also what is needed to sustain it. No responsibility 
devolves upon the infant: its wants are provided for and met. 

This is good, but can there not be a better? It depends. 
There can be no better for the infant than what is provided 
for it by natural relationship, but the infant cannot remain 
an infant indefinitely. By the law of its own nature growth is 
compulsory. 

Infancy is bur a temporary state, having its natural lim- 
itations, and it must be passed beyond and left behind. Nature 
herself teaches this lesson, for the mother's milk ceases to flow 
when demand is no longer made upon it. The infant must out- 
grow infancy, becoming the child; and the child requires dif- 
ferent food. 

As growth goes on, the time for weaning arrives. To ~ 
is to accustom a child to food other than its mother's milk. 
This time is frequently a time of trial. The child does not 
like to lose that to which it is accustomed. Did the little one 
express its thought and feeling it would probably say, "It is 
cruel to take my mothers milk away from me. I have always 
had it and I want it still. It belongs to me, and there is no 
justice in depriving me of it. See those infants over there! 
They have their natural food still, and I have the same r:rh: 
to it that they have. Why should all this pain and misery be 
inflicted upon me? I: is not right." 

And from the little one 5 s point of view he is right. Yet, 
fortunately for him, nature, and not his point of view, governs. 



58 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

Did his feeling govern instead, would lie ever become a man? 
If his desire to retain indefinitely his mother's milk were to 
prevail, would his best good be served? 

Because nature compels growth, because the fact of in- 
fancy involves the further facts of childhood, boyhood, and 
manhood, his weaning is a necessity that, however stern, is really 
kind. The little one's natural ignorance prevents him from 
recognizing the kindness; he feels the sternness without under- 
standing its necessity, and his rebellion is natural. But it is 
rebellion against what is better for him, just the same. 

You, and this is true of all, are the little child grown from 
the more helpless infant, that must be weaned from what is 
merely natural to it; and none of us like the weaning process. 
We resist it and bewail it and wonder what we have ever done 
that we should be so afflicted. How can God send such trials 
upon us, if God is Love? And because of our natural ignorance 
our protests and bewailings amount to just this — "I want to 
remain a nursing infant and I ought to be allowed to re- 
main so." 

You think that, if you had your way, you could arrange 
human life and its affairs much better than they are now 
conducted. How true it is that " fools rush in where angels 
fear to tread." Look at yourself. What do you know? You 
see a great world about you, see human beings of all kinds and 
sorts, with every possible kind of condition and experience. 
You see a vast disorderly jumble of want, woe, pleasure, misery, 
joy, pain. What does it mean? 

Have you arrived at the stage where you are ready to find 
out? Eeady and able to see that the natural experiences of 
each one bring him inevitably to the weaning time which his 
own nature compels? To the time when he must let go what 
was good for him at first, and because that growth, compelled 
by what he is in being, has a better in store for him? 

How hard we try to remain infants, resisting all that tends 
to make us men. Yet the resistance is natural, till our ignorance 
of the destiny that is compelled by origin is lessened through 
knowledge; till we begin to discern what we are and what we 
are destined to become. 

You who are crying and struggling and declaring that you 
will not be weaned, that it is cruel and wicked that you should 
be deprived of what you have always had, are being brought by 
the law of your own being, not by an arbitrary God, to where 
you must pass on into what is better for you. It is far better 
for you that you be compelled to seek for and find food for 
yourself, than that you should continue to have your early milk 
supplied to you. 

Manhood is involved in your childhood, but it will never 
be evolved and established as long as you insist upon continu- 



THE TIME FOR WEANING. 59 

ing the natural infancy. Here is the kindness in the seeming 
cruelty. When all goes well with us, when everything is just 
as we wish it, our satisfaction is a preventive of the develop- 
ment insisted upon by both God and Nature. We are content 
with the milk and have no incentive to develop spiritual bone 
and muscle. Fortunately nature and experience cut our teeth 
for us and proclaim that the time for other food has come. 

The gradual manifestation of what we are in our God- 
derived being brings relentlessly the time when we must move 
on from childhood through boyhood toward manhood; those 
stages of self-consciousness that constitute existence. The 
eternal energy that is resistless pushes us out of the one into 
the other. Because we do not understand, we hang back, offer- 
ing a resistance that requires a stronger push to overcome, and 
that consequently causes pain — God's ministering angel. Our 
pain eventually makes us step with the push. 

You were born to affluence, were you? You have always 
been accustomed to luxury, have had good health and plenty 
of friends. One by one these good things have melted away 
from you till now you are comparatively alone, both health 
and money gone, discouraged, unhappy, disconsolate. Whose 
trouble is like unto your trouble? 

Your story is but the old, old story, common to the human 
race, the same in essence, though it differ with different in- 
dividuals in form and coloring. You are being pushed by the 
creative energy toward soul-manhood, and your pain and sor- 
row are caused by your clinging clutch upon infancy and its 
milk-food. You do not like to be compelled to eat the " strong 
meat " that is better adapted to higher needs. You resent the 
teeth that experience must help you to cut in order that you 
may partake of other food. 

Look away from your miseries for the moment and look 
at yourself. What are you? You are a living soul, growing out 
from a perfectly endowed God-being that is known only as it 
is manifested. You are not flesh and blood, you are using flesh 
and blood temporarily. You are now more than that thing 
you are using, and because of what you are in being, you must 
become more than you are now. 

In your knowledge of your being and its origin you are 
naturally an infant; but childhood, boyhood, and manhood are 
involved in infancy and necessitate a becoming that leaves each 
behind till the highest is reached. As a living soul, grow you 
must; it is the stern necessity of your being. Your temporal 
flesh-body may drop away from you, but you, the living soul, 
must move on to the accomplishment of your destiny. 

The law of manifestation of being is truly kind even when 
it seems the most cruel. You are given your opportunity, in 
what to you seems deprivation, to pass from dependent child- 



60 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

hood into a higher self-consciousness by proving your power 
to command for yourself what has hitherto been yours without 
effort. It is a glorious opportunity and you are a privileged 
person to have it. 

You are entitled to the fruit of the tree of life, but you 
must put forth your hand to take it. 

By virtue of what you are in being — " the image of God," 
"very good" — you are entitled to health and happiness, to 
adequate supply for all your needs; but as a living soul you must 
lay hold upon them for yourself. Only the very experiences 
you are undergoing, and that seem so very bitter to you, would 
bring this great truth home to you, and spur you on to the 
necessary effort at appropriation. They are good for you, how- 
ever evil they seem to you, for they are a means toward this 
greatly to be desired end. 

By finding what you can do without, you discover what 
you must have. What you can do without is what is not needed 
for the greater becoming. What is requisite for that becoming 
is what you must have, and the great storehouse holds it for you. 

No one in the world is a favorite with the Almighty and 
recipient of blessings, over and above yourself. The greatest 
saint that ever lived in the world had no higher relation to the 
eternal Absolute than you have. There have been many, prob- 
ably, who were more conscious of that relation and its possible 
consequences, but this consciousness may be yours also. 

Stop thinking of your miseries. You are dwelling in a 
graveyard because you live continually in the past. You are 
thinking all the time of what you have had, when you should 
be thinking of what you may become. Get out from among 
the tombs and live in the sunlight of inherent possibility. 

No one has become what you may not become. No one 
has achieved what you may not achieve. To become is a thou- 
sand times better than to have been. Milk was all right for you 
at first, but some day you must eat meat. Infancy is natural, 
but it cannot last forever. First the natural infancy of the 
soul, and afterward its spiritual manhood, attained only by self- 
effort joined to the universal push. 

What of it if your friends are gone and your luxury also? 
You have yourself, and you would know nothing of your inherent 
resources, the riches within, if you were not driven to look for 
them through deprivation. The little child would not eat ex- 
clusively the other food, if its mother's breast continued always 
at command. Eejoice that you are being brought to where you 
may know the possible, even at the loss of some of the temporal. 



MAKING THINGS GO EIGHT. 

" dear! nothing goes right and I am tired to death trying 
to make things go right! " 

This is what you are thinking and feeling; consequently, 
you are not very happy. Do you wish to know what the matter 
is? It is friction; just that, friction. 

Did you ever stand by a machine and watch its workings and 
hear now and then a grating noise in one place and a squeak in 
another? Those were indications that there was something wrong 
somewhere, a lack of proper adjustment between the parts of the 
machine, and a need of lubricating oil. They told the story to 
the one who could read it. 

You are " out of gear," and your grating and squeaking tell 
the story to those that can read it. There is lack of proper ad- 
justment somewhere, and a need of lubricating oil. You have 
tried your level best to make those for whom you feel yourself 
responsible do as they should, and do it in the way in which it 
ought to be done; and with all your effort things still go wrong. 
You have tried so hard to do your duty, and you still desire to do 
your duty, but you are, you say, " tired to death," and feel as if 
you could not make much more effort. 

How the machine grates, grinds, and squeaks! Let us see if 
we cannot discover where the difficulty lies. You have been try- 
ing to accomplish what does not belong to you to accomplish. 
You have been endeavoring to make others do thus and so when 
they cannot really do what is right till they see for themselves 
and act upon their own seeing. 

You have forgotten that your dear ones are also individuals. 
You have tried to make them see through your eyes, instead of 
trying to help them to see with their own eyes what you see. 
Your effort was not adjusted to the eternal principles and laws 
of being, and so you were compelled to push it to accomplish- 
ment. And you have pushed and pushed till you are " tired to 
death." 

Look this fact squarely in the face. Your child is first God's 
child, and afterward, yours. Equally is this true of your brother, 
your sister, your friend. The relation to the eternal First Cause 



62 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

gives individuality, and individuality is first. The family rela- 
tion is second, and tributary to the first. You have been trying 
to make the second relation all in all. 

Yon are a living soul; so is your child, your husband, your 
wife, your brother, sister, or friend. You and they have come into 
existence with a common destiny stretching before you. Human 
existence and its experiences are the logical, therefore the divinely 
ordained means by which the human soul passes from a sense of 
being to the realization of being. All possible human existence, 
all possible experience, lies between these two points; is entered 
and passed through by every human soul, whatever the race, color, 
or creed. Nothing that you can do can alter this order or remove 
its necessity; and however much you may love another, your love 
and your effort can abate not " one jot or tittle from the law till 
all be fulfilled." 

As the individual, not as the child of fleshly relationship and 
dependent entirely upon that relationship, must the one whom 
you speak of as yours travel in the road that lies between natural 
sense and spiritual realization. You have been trying to carry 
your loved ones over that road on your own shoulders. What 
success you have had at one time, at another time has brought 
defeat. You have not adjusted yourself to the necessity and order 
that is compelled by the Origin of humanity. You have put 
yourself in the place of another's individuality, endeavoring to do 
for him what that should accomplish. 

And this is not only your own, but our common mistake. 
Not understanding what you have done, you have grieved sin- 
cerely over the scant success you have had, for your motives were 
pure, and your efforts unselfish in the main. You were working 
for the good of one who was dear to you. But if you think a 
moment, you will see that individuality is a mighty factor, to be 
reckoned with in all our efforts for others. Not all your love for 
another can make his heart beat, his lungs expand, his bodily 
organs perform their functions, or digest his food. It may affect 
those functions, but it cannot perform them. He must eat and 
sleep for himself, not through you; he must do his own breath- 
ing. Equally necessary is it that eventually he must do his own 
thinking, must resolve and act from his own individuality. 

What then can you do for him ? You can show him the way, 
instruct him as to what belongs to the way, teach him how to walk 
in the way, and inspire him to make effort to use his feet. You 
can even grasp his hand and steady his footsteps, but you cannot 
carry him from the beginning to the end of the way on your own 
back. By doing what you can do, doing it with all your heart and 
soul, you come into adjustment with the principles and laws of 
being that are working in and through human existence to their 
own manifestation, and you avoid the friction that " tires you to 
death." 



MAKING THINGS GO RIGHT. 63 

See that just as you have your own salvation from all evil to 
work out, so has your best beloved as well; that as help in that 
direction is good and valuable for you, so is it good and valuable 
for him; but that the help to help one's self is all that truly helps. 

You wish your son to be a good and upright man, a credit to 
the family. You want him to be successful in business or in his 
profession, have a position in society, possess influence in the com- 
munity. This is all good. But how do you wish it accom- 
plished? " If he will only do what I tell him, I can bring it all 
about," you say. Can you ? You may be largely instrumental in 
securing a certain amount of worldly success, but the soul-success 
depends upon himself. Neither you, nor any human being, can 
make another good and upright, but any one can help another to 
become so. 

Here is your brother who has disappointed you sorely. He is 
unsuccessful in business, has formed bad habits, is in danger of 
losing the esteem of others. All this might have been saved, you 
think, if he had only listened to you. Yes, if he had been a pup- 
pet who moved as you pulled the wires, then he would have 
moved only as you directed. But as he is not a puppet, but a 
human being, possessing the power of choice, he has not chosen 
to act according to your desire, not seeing, presumably, what you 
see and what prompts your desire. 

And so individuality asserts itself in those to whom we are 
related after the flesh; and it will not down. It must be reckoned 
with, and adjustment to it is the only way to deal with it success- 
fully. When in all earnestness and loving sincerity you have 
done what is in your power to do, see that the remainder rests 
with the individual. 

"But my brother's ill fortune has come from others. He 
is so easily influenced he has been drawn into bad company, and 
this association has given him bad habits and made him neglect 
his business." 

Yes, it is the old story, old as human nature itself. And 
your conclusion is that your influence must make him what you 
want him to be. It is because he is easily influenced that he has 
fallen to the level of his lesser nature. It is only through in- 
fluencing himself that he will rise to the altitude of his higher 
nature. Your influence is for good when it is wisely exerted, but 
Oh! the need for wisdom in your use of it. When your influence 
is used to help him make of himself what is possible, then you and 
your effort are adjusted to the meaning of existence and the need 
of the human soul; but when it is only your influence, minus the 
effort of his own individuality, that holds him back from any- 
thing whatsoever, so sure is it that when you relax and let go he 
will gravitate to it inevitably. 

The great necessity is this adjustment to what existence is 
according to the principles that compel it; and you — as we all — 



64 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

make the mistake of thinking your feeling should and must deter- 
mine consequences for another. You " desire only what is right 
and best " ? True; hut this result as a permanency for another 
cannot come because you wish it. It must come because that 
other wishes it. Because you desire it for that other, you will 
help toward it all you can; but the wiser help is not given when 
individuality and its power of choice are not sufficiently reckoned 
with. 

Do you see that you have tried to stand in God's stead? 
That you have tried to make what it requires the Infinite to make ? 
That instead of co-operating toward a result you have tried to do 
all the work? 

It is no wonder you are " tired to death." The impersonal 
never gets tired, and its ceaseless push will go on when your time 
to cease pushing has come. You have a part to perform. Each 
is his brother's keeper, in that each owes generous and loving help 
to others. But help to an end does not mean effort on one side 
only. It means co-operation, help joined to help, effort joined to 
effort. To see and understand this will save you so much of the 
disappointment and pain that comes from trying to put your 
own individuality in place of another's. Each soul is from a com- 
mon source, is moving toward a common result. Between the be- 
ginning and the end of the way, experiences are various. Both 
the depths and heights of possibilities are to be known. 

If your dear one is drawn toward the depths, fix your own 
eye upon the heights and know, not hope, that he will yet scale 
them triumphantly. Stand ever ready to help, but stand in your 
own place, not in the place of the Almighty. Let your push be 
one with the infinite push and "in process of time it cometh 
to pass." 

It is this " process of time " that you rebel against, not seeing 
its necessity. Your feeling, your desire, cloud your vision. It is 
not easy to stand on one side and look upon those you love from 
the impersonal standpoint; but our energy is largely misdirected 
till we can do this. 

Cold-blooded, is it? Lack of feeling? 

God is no respecter of persons. What does that mean? Does 
it not mean that we must come into accord with what God is, com- 
pelling our feeling to that end, instead of expecting God to ac- 
commodate His own nature to our desire? 

In our real being God's work is done; adaptation to that 
which, therefore, eternally is, is our work. As we learn to do this, 
friction ceases. Adjustment accomplishes all things. Stop push- 
ing. Instead, let the great purpose be fulfilled in your brother. 



HOW THE WORLD COMES TO AN END. 

You have heard more than one prediction, doubtless, that 
the world would come to an end on a certain definite date; and, 
while you do not believe in being superstitious, you have mentally 
marked this date, and looked at it now and then with a little 
creeping chill and a " I wonder if it really will? " 

Of course you have said, with a laugh at the prediction, " How 
can any one tell? The world has wagged on for many centuries 
and I think it will wag on for many more." Yet you confess to a 
slight feeling of uneasiness at times, and you would really like to 
know, if it can be known, when the world will really come to an 
end. Can any one predict with certainty? 

Yes. The world will come to an end, for you, when you have 
outgrown it. When it has come to an end for you, it will still 
remain for those who have not outgrown it. 

The world will never come to an end all at once for every 
one living. By its nature it persists, by our nature we pass it and 
leave it behind. Do you wish to understand this? Then give 
your attention for a few minutes to a view that you can afterward 
apply practically. 

When you were a child you began your study of the science 
of numbers. As the student you were the beginner; the science 
of numbers did not begin then. It was, had always been, and, by 
its nature, must always be. The science of numbers is abstract 
truth. You began to seek that truth and consequently you began 
to discover it. You had capacity for this seeking and finding, 
otherwise your effort would have been of no use. 

But your capacity developed as you went along. Your persist- 
ent seeking was the means of your own development, and that 
development of inherent capacity gave more and more discovery. 
From the beginner, knowing nothing of the science of numbers, 
you became an expert, one who knew and proved. 

At the beginning of your effort you found, ready to hand, a 
means to the end in view. You wished and intended to become a 
mathematician; this was the goal you sought. You began the 
development of your inherent capacity by your use of the black- 
board and figures. The blackboard and figures were not the 



66 HOW TO CONTEOL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

science of numbers, were not the abstract truth you had set your- 
self to seek; they were only a first and necessary means to your 
end. 

As the first means and necessary to a beginner, they were 
good. Because they were the first, or natural, means, they could 
not continue to be as important for you all the way to the end. 
The reliance which you placed in them when you were the be- 
ginner could not continue and you become the expert mathema- 
tician. 

You found it necessary after a time to endeavor to solve prob- 
lems, to see their principles and obtain the answers, with less use 
of the blackboard and figures and with more reliance upon your 
own powers. Mental arithmetic took the place of your former 
work, done entirely by use of the blackboard and figures. These 
came to an end for you when you outgrew the need for them; but 
they remained to meet the need for those who still required them. 

In themselves, you see, the blackboard and figures did not 
come to an end. They were not annihilated. They remained, 
for what they were in themselves; but what they had leen for you 
came to an end, and wisely so, otherwise you would not have be- 
come the expert mathematician. The power to work problems 
mentally is necessary to that end. 

Now apply this illustration to the visible world. It, and 
what it contains, is the blackboard with figures upon it. What a 
wide variety is spread out before you. You, the living soul using 
a flesh-body, are a beginner in your search for the truth of your 
being; that abstract truth that is the science of being. As a living 
soul you have inherent capacity for discovery, for understanding 
this science, for its practical application to the problems of your 
own existence. You are to become the expert, the demonstrator 
of all these problems from simple to complex. 

But this attainment depends upon your beginning as a seeker 
for the hidden truth. This discovery, with the power to demon- 
strate all that may be found, is the aim of your existence as a 
living soul. This work accomplished is the end of your natural 
and the perpetuation of your spiritual existence. 

As a means to this end, a natural means, the visible world with 
its variety confronts you. You are to use it as a beginner. You 
are to leave it when, becoming more than a beginner, you pass 
beyond it in the work you have to do. By your own growth be- 
yond the need for the world, you will leave it behind, and it will 
come to an end, for you. 

What says the Great Example? " Be of good cheer. I have 
overcome the world." It seems to you that you can never outgrow 
this world. What! leave all beauties it reveals, the good things 
and dear friends that are so much to you? 

Yes and no. When you became able to work your problems 
mentally you retained in your consciousness all that had real value. 



HOW THE WOKLD COMES TO AN END. 67 

You dealt with numbers, their values, their relation to each other, 
their governing principle. You dropped only the external shapes, 
the figures on the blackboard. Turning from the blackboard, the 
externals, you had internally, all that was real; all that was 
represented by what was on the blackboard. You neither left nor 
lost anything that was essential in itself, only what had been at 
first essential to you, but which, as you gained more and more 
discovery, as the development of your own inherent powers in- 
creased, became less and less necessary. 

As the beginner in the science of being, you need the great 
blackboard with its figures. What you are, what all men are, in 
the composite nature of being, is represented to you by the world 
and what belongs to it. The correspondence between the differ- 
ing shapes you see, all the way from the amoeba to physical man, 
and the variety in your own fundamental being, is the relation of 
figure to number. Back of numbers is their governing principle. 

You are to begin to overcome the world by outgrowing your 
dependence upon it. Only by outgrowing your dependence upon 
it as something external to yourself, something indispensable, will 
you use it. Up to that point it uses you. While the student uses 
the blackboard and figures as one entirely dependent upon them, 
they really use him. He is to use his own powers, depending upon 
them, instead of being entirely at the mercy of the blackboard. 
When he has outgrown his own natural dependence upon it, he 
will use it, not for his own, but for others 5 needs; for the demon- 
stration to them, that can see only by means of a blackboard, of 
what he knows. 

You, as a living soul, have this destiny before you. You are 
to become the expert demonstrator of your own fundamental 
nature. This demonstration is in an ascending scale till your 
likeness to God — to Origin — appears. You are fated to meet all 
the obstacles your natural blindness to the truth of your being 
puts in your way. You overcome your fate with your destiny. 

You have inherent capacity for knowing your own nature 
and its origin. Your human experience is developing that capac- 
ity, so do not cry out that you cannot bear it when some experience 
.makes demand upon this capacity. Without demand, there would 
be no development; without development, there would be no at- 
tainment, and from beginning to end, all is good. 

You will never be obliged to forsake anything really essential. 
In your overcoming of the world you will carry along with you 
all the good and true, leaving behind only the first means by 
which you found the good and true. All the pure, true love you 
have given to others, all that they have given to you, will go with 
you as you outgrow the need of the world-blackboard. All that 
is fit to survive will survive the means by which it was discovered. 

You need fear no real loss, for gain is constant. It is more 
and more of the real, with less and less of the phenomenal; more 



68 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

and more power, everlasting power, as you grasp the real, using 
the phenomenal without being used by it. 

This is the secret of Jesus' life and power, and as he is our 
example, we are to do what he did by becoming what he was. He 
was master of the phenomenal world, the blackboard with its 
figures. He used it, it never used him. He used it for the demon- 
stration of his nature, his God-derived being, to those who could 
see only by means of the blackboard. His words, " Be of good 
cheer. I have overcome the world," were equivalent to saying, 
" Do not be discouraged. What I have done you may do." 

Let go your hold on the outer world by feeling that it is not 
as necessary to you as it once was; by feeling that you are not as 
dependent on fleshly ties as you used to be; that there is com- 
pensation for all mortal sense of loss in the growing realization 
that what is represented by these ties is more than their out- 
ward form. 

" Who are my mother and my brethren? " Were these words 
Jesus' repudiation of fleshly ties? By no means. They were 
the recognition of a larger relationship, a greater that includes 
all the lesser. 

Holding to the outward, failing to see what is represented by 
the outward, you suffer as one without hope when anything dear 
to you is taken away. But this is your chance to find and prove 
your own power to do without it; to have and use in yourself 
that which shall give you gain for every loss; for what is stored 
in your consciousness can not be taken away from you. 

The problem is there, and the answer is there also. Write 
it down there, and it is yours forever. 

So take courage. " Gird up your loins " and see that destiny 
is stronger than fate; that fate is temporal and destiny is of the 
eternal. The circumstances attending the development of your 
own powers come to an end, but you go on "from glory to 
glory." Not one experience comes into your life that you are not 
inherently able to meet and conquer; and the experience is your 
opportunity for development of your power. 

However evil to you, all experience is good for you. Remem- 
ber that. 



HOW THE LORD PROVIDES. 

" The Lord will provide." 

You are fond of quoting that, are you not? 

It is well to have confidence and trust in the infinite power,, 
well to refrain from anxiety and worry, but take care that you 
do not fall into another error. It is true that " the Lord will 
provide," but how does the Lord provide? 

That is not your affair? You mistake, it is your affair. " The 
Lord helps those who help themselves," and this is the Lord's way 
of providing. 

Suppose you had to cross a stream and there were no bridge. 
Because of your confidence and trust in the Lord's power to pro- 
vide a bridge, you would sit quietly down and wait till a bridge 
over the stream appeared, would you? Do you not think you 
would get rather tired waiting? 

You are expecting a miracle and there are no miracles. The 
Lord works with and according to law, not contrary to it; law 
is never suspended or violated. 

You need a bridge in order to continue your journey and 
you can have it. The Lord will provide one when you do your 
part of the work, not before. If you use the power that is yours 
from the Lord, and go to work to build a bridge, you can have 
one. " Prepare ye the way of the Lord "; this is your part, and 
as your part is performed, the Lord provides. 

Overanxious thought for the future is an extreme that should 
be avoided. Worry accomplishes nothing but robbery. It robs 
us of our strength and happiness, makes us weaklings and cowards. 
But over-passivity is equally unwise, even when we dignify it by 
the name of " trust in the Lord." Not even God Almighty obtains 
result without action, and do you think you can accomplish what 
God cannot? 

You must work for what you want to the extent of doing your 
part, then you may safely trust the rest to the Lord, not before. 
Action on your side is an essential for result, and to sit down 
quietly, fold the hands passively and say, " the Lord will provide," 
before you have prepared the way for the Lord to provide, is con- 
trary to the established order of things. 



70 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

"But I have done everything I know how to do, and I am 
not out of my difficulties yet," you say. Then you may safely 
trust the rest, if you have really done all you know how to do, and 
as sure as God is God " things will take a turn." Here is where 
trust is legitimate, essential. If you know what you are in your 
real being, what you are as a personality, and what the meaning 
of existence, you know that the most adverse circumstances, ad- 
verse to mortal sense, are really good for you, for the great purpose 
is being worked out through them. 

But when the adverse circumstances come from neglect of 
opportunities, failure to see and use them, neglect of duties and 
shirking of responsibilities, the situation is quite another matter, 
and trust in the Lord, as the one who will shortly get you out of 
it, is misplaced. 

It is you who need to get up and get out by your own effort, 
and the Lord would not be willing to deprive you of such a fine 
opportunity. While you wait for him to work a miracle, he will 
wait for you to do what belongs to you to do, and he can afford 
to wait much longer than you can. 

You are lazy, and you believe that you trust in the Lord. 
Your kind of trust is really laziness. It is so much easier to fall 
back against the Lord as a prop than to be energetic and wide 
awake, alive to your responsibilities and opportunities, active in 
your use of them. You can trust in the Lord enough to put you 
into the poorhouse, and you can trust in yourself and in what you 
can accomplish " in the strength of the Lord " enough to put 
you into a palace of your own. Eeal trust is accompanied by the 
action that reaches out for result, false trust by an inaction that 
blocks the way to result. 

There is a deal of sham sentiment connected with trust in 
the Lord. You have had much of it yourself and you had better 
examine your own position carefully to see if you are neglecting 
to do your part. What is your part? Use of every power, fac- 
ulty, and capacity you have. 

The Lord is your own real being. To this real being pertain 
God-like powers and possibilities, but you, the living soul using 
a flesh body, are the user of these powers, the one who fulfils the 
possibilities. The Lord cannot get along without you any more 
than you can get along without the Lord. The Lord needs you 
for manifestation. What the Lord is, is proved or demonstrated 
through you; and when you fail to do your part there is failure 
of demonstration. " A little more slumber, a little more folding 
of the hands to sleep " is a cessation of the activity that belongs 
to you that prevents the power of the Lord from being manifest. 

Dismiss the idea that the Lord is a great and powerful being 
separate from yourself, who rules over the destinies of mankind 
according to his good pleasure, and gives you what you desire 
when you sit down quietly and smile serenely and wait for it to 



HOW THE LORD PROVIDES. 71 

drop into your lap. The Lord is not God, and neither God nor 
the Lord is this kind of a being. 

God is the infinite Love, the supreme Mind that is the Origin 
of all that lives, and the Lord is the expression of God, the indi- 
vidualization of God. The Lord is the Divine Ideal, the archetypal 
Man that is your own individual identity; and you, whatever your 
family name, are the living soul that is a measure of recognition 
of that identity. Hence, from the Lord comes all that you are 
and have, and the Lord does provide for you most bountifully. 
You may draw upon and use all the resources of being, all the 
powers of the Lord, and thus you develop and actualize all the 
Lord's possibilities. 

Because of your relation to the Lord, you are capable of over- 
coming all that stands in the way of your growth in self-conscious- 
ness, but action on your part is an absolute essential. Existence 
for you and for all is progress in self -recognition, a finding and 
knowing the Lord more and more. 

You are able to think, reason, apprehend and comprehend; 
able to compare one possible situation with another and make your 
choice between them; able to work to bring about what you need 
and desire, and to avoid — to make effort to avoid — what you do 
not desire. All this is from the Lord; therefore, when you do 
these things, you do your part and prepare the way of the Lord. 
When you neglect to do them because of a false sentiment, you 
fail to prepare the way of the Lord, and his nature and power will 
not be demonstrated through you. 

You are the warrior in the arena of human existence. Your 
enemies are your instinctual, natural tendencies. From the Lord 
comes the strength and power to put them under your feet making 
them your footstool. If you are on the Lord's side instead of on 
the side of the instincts and tendencies, if you throw your power 
into that scale instead of into the other one, you are bound to 
succeed in all right undertakings, for the Lord will provide. 

Sentiment is necessary in existence and cannot well be 
spared. It is the warm sunshine that brings forth many a beauty 
that otherwise would not appear. A man without sentiment is 
a man with a small soul, but necessary as it is, understanding is as 
necessary to keep it from being of a false quality. Sentiment 
without understanding leads to mistakes, even as does over-ration- 
alism without sentiment. The purely sentimental view of "the 
Lord will provide " leads to the cessation of the personal activity 
that is vitally necessary for growth and progress. " With all thy 
getting get understanding " for without it you will not have that 
provision from the Lord that otherwise you might have. 

Effort is necessary for growth. Effort in your own, your 
merely personal strength, falls short of what is possible to you. 
Effort put forth in the strength of the Lord will accomplish all 
things eventually. Add your own personal effort to the Great 



72 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

Push that is moving everything in Creation, and nothing can for- 
ever bar your way to consciousness of infinite power as your own 
power. 

The Lord will provide, the Lord does provide, the Lord is 
always providing for you and your needs. Are you always ready 
to use the provision? You, the living soul, may achieve and 
become what nothing else that lives can accomplish. You may go 
on " from glory to glory " unconquered but conquering at every 
step of the way. You may do this, but not when you do nothing 
and trust everything. 

Trust in yourself through understanding what you are as an 
existent soul, and what your real being, is quite as necessary as 
your beautiful trust in the Lord. The practical side is seen in the 
words: " and keep your powder dry." All the trust in the Lord 
in the world will not send your bullet to the mark, if your powder 
is not in proper condition. You cannot, even in the name of 
religion, ignore Nature without paying a penalty. Not even God 
works contrary to Nature but always in accord with her. You 
must do the same, and as you work with Nature you attain do- 
minion over all things, but this dominion as a practical fact is 
gained, not given. 

It is given primarily, and is an abstract possibility as the 
power of the Lord; but as a proved and demonstrated fact you 
must win it for yourself. Do not deceive yourself. Others may 
point to you as an example of Christian resignation, but some day 
and somewhere and somehow you must bestir yourself from that 
sloth; for it is sloth and not common sense. Be resigned after 
you have done your part, not before. In the strength of the Lord, 
by the power of your eternal God-derived being, you may accom- 
plish all things, for all things are yours to accomplish. 

Will you get understanding? 



TOTPKOFITABLE COMPANIONS. 

" It is of no use for me to try, for I have not your ability." 

What kind of a mental picture is that? One that is going 
to stimulate and strengthen you, or one that will discourage 
and enervate you? You can easily answer, can you not? 

Have you never heard the saying, " Comparisons are odi- 
ous" ? This is true in one sense and untrue in another. All 
depends upon the standard of comparison. When you compare 
yourself with a great artist or musician, with one who stands 
upon the top round of the ladder of success, you surfer by the 
comparison. You fall below that standard and permit yourself 
to be downcast and discouraged in consequence; and, seeking 
a reason for your lower level, you say, " I never had his ability 
or opportunity, and I never shall have them." 

You mistake. In your own judgment of your possibilities 
your standard is wrong. Judging your own success by what the 
successful man has accomplished, it is far less than his; but when 
you judge your inherent ability by his success, you are in error. 

" What man has done, man may do " used to be in our copy- 
books at school as a means of stimulating our ambition and 
effort; and the lives of self-made men, those who had carved 
the statue, " Success," from the hard marble of obstacle, were 
held before us as examples of what we might become. Perhaps 
when we were older we said, " That is all very well theoretically, 
but practically one cannot accomplish all that another accom- 
plishes, for we are not all alike." And perhaps we have held 
that opinion to this day. 

How much we need a glimpse of the meaning of existence 
to enable us to sift our opinions and see where they are sound 
or unsound! Our successes and our failures, our happiness and 
our misery, depend largely upon our habitual standard of compari- 
son; for in human existence everything is relative. Standards 
differ, consequently, but one tendency is manifest with all. 

This tendency is seen with you in your self-judgment just 
pronounced, the tendency to make the one state of conscious- 
ness that we call "this life" the measure of our opportunity 
and result. Look at this man who represents for you what you 



74 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

would dearly love to become. Though there is a marked dif- 
ference between what he has done and what you have accom- 
plished, judged by the average worldly standard, how does he 
differ from you fundamentally? 

He is a man, a human being. So are you. He possesses the 
capabilities inherent in human nature. So do you. He has all 
that goes to make up the genus homo. So have you. He had 
a fleshly father and mother. So had you. On the natural side 
he is related to that father, mother and family; to the world 
in general. So are you. On the hidden side he is related to 
the Great All, and endowed with the faculties and powers that 
are from that source, and not from flesh. So are you. As a 
living soul he came into existence stamped with family and 
racial tendencies. So did you. As a living soul he has a God- 
being from which these tendencies are to be made to serve the 
Great Purpose. So have you. 

The strength and power of the Lord are yours as they are 
his. His family tendencies, as compared with yours, are not 
quite like them; but as compared with the purpose of existence, 
they are equally a means by which you both may prove your 
power over natural tendency. As living souls with existence 
itself, from its lowest to its topmost plane, before you, you stand 
on the same footing and have equal opportunity, for, in your 
real being, you are alike. As members of families, your dom- 
inant tendencies, your privileges and opportunities according 
to conventional standards, are not alike. 

But with which relationship goes the most power? The 
relation to Origin or the relation to a temporal family? Which 
is the most lasting? Heredity from God, or heredity of the 
flesh ? What do Xature and its working Principle aim to produce 
as the highest product? A member of a community or the 
individual? 

Take this view of yourself. " In my relation to the Great 
All, and in my consequent possibilities, I am as if there were 
no other human being in existence. My real being is the uni- 
verse. As a living soul I am in that universe, and I am to know 
it throughout its vast range, to its outermost boundaries. This 
is my destiny and nothing can thwart it. oSTo one is, or can be 
more than I am. ISTo one has, or can accomplish more than I 
can, for no one can know more than his own being, or do more 
than make its nature and power manifest." 

"Lift up your heads ye gates! and the king of glory 
shall come in. Who is the king of glory? The Lord of hosts. 
He is the king of glory." 

Open the gate through which may come your own God- 
derived being in his majesty and power. You close it hard 
and fast when you think and feel, "I shall never amount to 
anything." What right have you to dishonor God's handiwork? 



UNPROFITABLE COMPANIONS. 75 

Man is the image of God. Then Man's powers are drawn from 
Deity, are sustained from that source, and who shall say that 
the supply fails? 

If the image of God, the real being, is the root from which 
every living soul draws its nourishment, what is possible for 
one is possible for all. It does not follow, however, that what is 
practical for one is, at the same moment, practical for all. Fun- 
damentally all are alike, and all alike may attain the same ulti- 
mate result — Divinity. But between Origin and Destiny ful- 
filled, there are stages of progress, and, at the same moment of 
time, one existent soul is in advance of another. 

But how shall the backward one catch up? By thinking 
" It is of no use, I never can get there," or by seeing, and cul- 
tivating the feeling, " Because of what I am in origin I can and 
shall reach it " ? Which view will yield the most result? There 
is a natural inertia for all, but you add to and increase it every 
time you compare yourself with another to conclude, " What 
he is is impossible for me." With God nothing is impossible. 
For you, a living soul, rooted in an eternal being, looking upon 
and using what, for you, is a temporal world, plus God, nothing 
is impossible. 

In your thought, your hope, your endeavor, detach your- 
self from the flesh now. You need not pass through physical 
death to do this. It is the dying daily of which Paul speaks. 
Attach yourself to God, and with this plus you can move the 
mountains of incompetency and failure out of your way, for 
this is the faith that moves mountains. 

Yet there is something else to be looked after. Examine 
yourself and see what is your motive for wishing to accomplish 
what the other man has accomplished. Standing on the top 
round, fame is his, the admiration and the plaudits of the world. 
Do you long for them? Is this the reason why you wish you 
could achieve what he has achieved? Would these plaudits 
sound sweet in your ears? Would you rest satisfied with the 
fame and admiration? Then it is better that you do not have 
them, better that you gain a victory over yourself than that 
what you call success should be yours. 

To find the source of power, to find ourselves, really, is so 
necessary and vital in the hurry and push of our modern civiliza- 
tion, where others who have gained what we want are our stand- 
ard of comparison. But to know how to use it when found is as 
necessary and vital; and this knowledge and the effort according 
to it will depend upon another standard. When we care more 
for our God-likeness than for our worldly-likeness, we shall 
achieve the otherwise impossible, a success that is eternal be- 
cause our " kingdom is not of this world." 

The ideal and the practical must walk hand in hand. Do 
not keep your eyes so fixed on a sentimental heaven that you 



76 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

have none for the ground you walk on and so stub your toes 
repeatedly; neither be so exceedingly utilitarian and politic that 
you never lift your eyes higher than the ground. This world 
and all that pertains to it is ours for use, and by your use of what 
Nature and your natural relations offer you, you work with the 
everlasting trend or contrary to it. Through an ignorant self- 
depreciation you are held back from what you might accom- 
plish. You need to look through the mask of flesh and blood 
to see what you are and what your powers, for till you see, you 
will not claim and use them. 

Do you think there is danger of an unwarranted egotism 
in this other view of what you are? There is not the least dan- 
ger when it is understood. The very last one in the world to 
become an egotist is he who has passed through the flood that 
destroys commonly accepted beliefs and opinions, because, as 
the individual, he has builded even a very small ark of under- 
standing. This flood is to prevail, you know, " till all the high 
hills under the whole heaven were covered " ; for the whole 
heaven of your own real being, that stands perfect and complete 
forever, is above this variable existence which is to be under- 
stood in its best and its least, its hills and its valleys, through 
its relation to the changeless and eternal. 

Understanding of what you are is the most important thing 
possible, for till you have it you are likely to either depreciate 
or unduly exalt yourself. The golden mean is found only through 
self-knowledge, and not through the self-knowledge that is 
called the evidence of the senses. Not till the evidence of the 
faculties is added to the evidence of the senses do you really 
know instead of believe. While it is true that "knowledge is 
power," true knowledge is the only true, or lasting power. 

Stop comparing yourself with those whom you envy — yes, 
you do envy them for all your protest. Compare yourself in- 
stead with what you may be, because in your real being you are 
as much as was even Jesus of Nazareth. If your real being is 
the image of God, who ever was or will be more? But he knew 
what he was, and what was possible to him in consequence; 
therefore he demonstrated what you have not yet demonstrated, 
for you have not known what he knew. " I and the Father are 
one," said he. Equally are you and the same Father united, or 
at-one; but you must gain the consciousness of that oneness 
which was the secret of Jesus' mighty works and power. 

Practically, you need not strive to become the best of musi- 
cians, of artists, of literateurs, but some day you must begin to 
strive to become the best of men; not better than any one who 
ever lived, but the very best species the genus, Man, can produce. 
For this is the aim and end of existence, and when you see the 
possibility and strive for it the Almighty God works with you 
for accomplishment. 



MENTAL PATTEKNS. 

You are a very good accountant, are yon not? You can 
count up your miseries with the most painstaking accuracy. Not 
the smallest of them will escape you. With the extended power 
of vision which long practice has given you, you will see the 
tiniest one, pounce upon it and drag it forth to appear in the 
sum total at the bottom of the list. 

Your power of vision and swift dexterity are commendable; 
whether the use to which you put them is profitable or not, is 
a matter of legitimate doubt. 

Are you as eager and ready to count up your blessings 
and joys? 

You have none to count? Oh! stop and think a minute. 
No one is without some, if ever so few. You have dwelt so long 
on your miseries, that it is hard for you to turn your eyes in an- 
other direction, but you will find something else to count up, if 
you persist. 

You are not now, you never have been, in a position or 
condition that could not be worse; and whatever prevented it 
from being worse was a blessing, therefore. Just look for a 
minute and you will find ever so many blessings in your life that 
you have not seen before because you did not look for them. The 
rule of addition is a good one to apply to your experiences, only 
try to apply it to the good as well as the evil, and be as zealous 
in the application, too. 

We become, practically, what we continually see. It is not 
meant that if we were to look at a tree quite constantly, we 
would become trees, for we never can change our fundamental 
nature; but what we persistently dwell upon mentally tends to 
embody itself in us, and give quality to our consciousness. 

A medical student who is studying different diseases to 
learn their symptoms and course, as is well known, is apt to run 
the scale and experience many of these symptoms in his own 
person. 

Persistent dwelling upon miseries, enlarges, emphasizes, and 
multiplies those miseries. The addition leads to multiplication. 
The rule will work both ways. Persistent attention to joys will 



78 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

multiply those joys. Multiplication is impersonal, what is mul- 
tiplied is personal, and you have something to say as to what 
shall be multiplied. 

Your birthright gives you power to have blessings multi- 
plied unto you, and you are throwing away your birthright, 
selling it for the miserable pottage of multiplied miseries. By 
your continual addition you are hugging your miseries close to 
you and you will not let them go; and there is no other way for 
them to forsake you. Till you let them go, they cannot go. 
You are the one who must choose. 

You enjoy them, did you know it? If you did not you 
would be driven in self-defence to look for your blessings. You 
have to look for something. You are so constituted, you can- 
not help it. You are the species that can form an ideal, a mental 
pattern, and hold it before your mental eye. You can form for 
yourself, you do form for yourself, the mental pattern accord- 
ing to which you build your outer life; and your building shows 
the material you have used. Your miseries are your pattern, and 
your life conforms to it. 

Now up with you and change your pattern. Be as resolute 
to do this as you have been to hug your cherished miseries and 
you will accomplish it. You must have a better mental pattern, 
this is imperative. Where can you find a better one than what 
you are in your real being? 

You do not know what you are in your real being? Then 
listen carefully. You are not a poor, weak, unappreciated suf- 
ferer, afflicted as is no one else; you are the image of God. 

You correct this statement, do you? You were the image 
of God originally, but not since Adam fell. 

Now what in the world has the theological Adam to do 
with you? Did you steal a pair of horses, or were you guilty of 
theft, because a man over in the next county stole some years 
ago? Use your common sense and do not be frightened by theo- 
logical bugaboos. Theology is formulated human opinions about 
God. Which is the greater and surer? Theology or God? 

Had you not better elect to stand by God, and that logic 
that is God's law, rather than by human and insufficient opinion? 
Who or what can change what God creates and endows? Who- 
ever or whatever can do this is greater than God. What is 
greater than God? There can be no greater, for the greatest is 
God. It follows then that what God creates and endows is 
changeless. What, then, is the consequence? 

You, this moment, in the real of you that is God's primary 
creation, are just what God created you. You never have been, 
you never will be anything different. No act of your own or 
another's can change you, for God is greatest. This suffering 
you, that is continually adding up miseries in order that they 
may be multiplied unto you, are not this God-created and en- 



MENTAL PATTERNS. 79 

dowed being. You are the seeker for it, its possible finder, the 
experiencer of all its possible capacities and their results; and 
you are experiencing the creative power of your thought with- 
out understanding what it all means. 

But your very experiences may, and eventually will un- 
cover that real being for you, and show you what you have done, 
why you have done it, and how far you have departed in your 
self-ideal from the eternal pattern. 

It will help you to tear aside the veil of temporal condition, 
and see and realize what you eternally are, if you will set about 
looking for and counting up your blessings. You will be sur- 
prised to find how many you have. And you will find the more, 
if you make it a rule of daily living to rejoice, rejoice without 
ceasing. If you do this you will have no time for mourning, 
you see. 

Did it ever strike you that continual mourning was multi- 
plied selfishness? No, surely not, for if you had seen it this way 
you would have set about correcting the habit. Dwelling upon 
miseries is a habit, a bad one, and we dignify it by the name of 
loyalty; loyalty to the old times, the old things, to our lost 
friends. The way to be rid of a bad habit is to form a good one. 
You need not wrestle and strive with the old habit, only just 
be persistent in forming the good one and the bad one will take 
care of itself. 

Suppose, when you get up in the morning and that dreadful 
feeling of depression comes over you, that you make it a rule 
to begin to sing. You do not think singing would do any good? 
Well! you try it and see, before you pronounce too positively. 
Sing something rousing, stirring, triumphant, something that 
embodies a contrary thought, something with a ring to it. Never 
mind if you disturb your neighbors a little — provided you have 
not arisen unseasonably early — you will help them also; for they 
will feel the vibration of the strong thought, and it will help to 
rouse in them the feeling it will rouse in you. 

Change of feeling is what you need, is what we all need; a 
change from the natural to the spiritual. It is in your power 
to bring about this change. When you feel like weeping, begin 
to praise the Lord. When it seems as if everything you valued 
was being taken from you, begin to thank the Lord for all that 
has been given you. 

Rejoicing is the great panacea for mourning. You can 
hardly do both at the same time, and if you will rejoice, how are 
you going to mourn? By being continually checked instead of 
encouraged, the tendency to mourn will die out. By being con- 
tinually encouraged the tendency to rejoice will be strengthened. 
Choose which you will serve, and look out that you make a 
profitable choice. 

You cannot rejoice when your eyes are full of tears and 



80 HOW TO CONTKOL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

your heart as heavy as lead ? You can try to, and the trying brings 
eventually fullness of result. You can try to see and think of the 
good things you have in your life — no life is so barren that there 
are none in it. Make it a point to look for and rejoice over these 
good things, thanking God that you have them, and you will 
find that there is given you " the oil of joy for mourning, the 
garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness." 

" I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful 
in my God." 

Make this resolve with yourself and then put it into prac- 
tice. Eejoice with your lips, if your heart feels like breaking. 
The sound of your voice, the thought to which it gives utter- 
ance, can and will help to rouse a response in you. All joy, 
beauty, and gladness, the sufficiency of all good things, are for 
you. Eeach out your hand to take them unto you. Do not be 
denied your lawful appropriation, by your miseries. The tree 
of life grows side by side with the tree of knowledge. Its fruit 
is yours for the taking. 

Make sunshine and you will have sunshine. The great 
source of supply is at your right hand. Because you are God- 
endowed you can command for yourself. You can draw from 
the infinite reservoir all you need. But to have it you must 
" greatly rejoice in the Lord/' for the Lord is your own eternal 
being, the image of God. Because your real being images or 
expresses God, nothing that pertains to its nature can be taken 
away from you, or destroyed. 

Eejoice that life, health, strength, power, peace, the fulness 
of life everlasting are yours by right of your origin. Be joyful 
in your God, for God is the source of this supply. 

Eejoice that you have a career to run, that whatever you 
experience on the way is but a help to a forward step, if you will 
make it so. 

Eejoice that you are alive and have both opportunity and 
power for proving your divine heritage; for helping your fellow- 
men to discover and prove theirs. 

Eejoice that you have valuable lessons set for you to learn; 
rejoice whether you like the books that contain them or not. 

Eejoice that you can stand as an individual in the world 
and see the whole panorama pass before you to the end, knowing 
what it means, and fearing nothing it presents to you. 

Eejoice that for you the mountains may fall, the rivers over- 
flow their beds, the sun be darkened and the moon fail to give 
her light, and your " I am " will remain. 

Eejoice that you can rejoice, that you may rejoice. Eejoice 
day by day more abundantly. Like birds of the night your mis- 
eries will take flight as the sun rises upon you. 



THE SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST. 

You axe greatly troubled about the " sin against the Holy 
Ghost"? 

You need not be. You do not understand what it is? That 
is why you are troubled. Understanding of your own nature 
and destiny will shed light upon this problem and remove your 
anxiety. It is when we lack necessary understanding that per- 
plexities overwhelm and submerge us. When found, it yields an 
explanation you have not gained elsewhere, for it is " Thus saith 
the Lord." 

You have learned that the flesh and blood body is not your- 
self, have you not? That, veiled by the object, there must be the 
seeing subject? Flesh and blood cannot be the living soul. The 
living soul that uses flesh and blood cannot be the thing used. 
The machine is one thing, the user of the machine quite another. 

This user of the machine, the living soul called by the fam- 
ily name to which you answer, occupies a position between its 
flesh and blood body and its real being, its Lord. It sees, natu- 
rally, only this body, with its environment, and not its real being. 
It must find and know its Lord. 

Existence is for that purpose. Existence and experience are 
one. In existence, or by experience, this living soul turns, 
some time, from its flesh body and environment as the all, to its 
real being or Lord, and sees that being as the eternal reality back 
of all the sense-phenomena on the plane of the flesh body. 

Then it — you — begins to live a new life. It — you — has been 
born again, born into a knowledge it did not have formerly; a 
knowledge that brings consequences before unknown. When 
this time comes for you — and it has come, has it not? — you begin 
to live according to this higher ideal. You no longer see your- 
self as a material being, created from dust, but as spiritual in 
your real being that you have found, as perfect, whole, intelligent, 
possessed of God-like powers. 

You have a new self-idea as a standard for daily living, a 
mental pattern before your inner eye according to which you try 
to think and live. A hitherto unknown feeling grows up in you, 
a feeling of certainty, security, peace. You say, " whereas I was 



82 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

blind, I now see." Existence itself, and all connected with it 
takes on a new meaning for you. 

God used to seem so far off, and you had more or less fear 
of Him. Now the Supreme Love that is God stands at your right 
hand, never leaving nor forsaking you. The constant Presence 
is your strength and support, and all fear of God has left you. A 
new way of gaining knowledge appears to you, an opening up 
from within, a bubbling, gently flowing spring of the water of 
life, a quiet, persistent revelation that answers your questions and 
becomes a factor in your daily life. 

You " seek unto the Lord " and the Lord answers you, for 
your own real being is all-knowing. The " Spirit of Truth " that 
shall lead you into all truth, enters in and takes up its abode with 
you. You are being led, led gently, where you used to be driven. 
You were driven hither and yon by your experiences, by their 
pain and unrest, before you knew of your real being and the 
meaning of existence; but now you are no longer driven. You 
see, even if dimly, where before all was dark, and you are drawn 
toward the light. 

You feel this drawing and you move with it willingly, escap- 
ing the driving that before pushed you reluctantly along. Exis- 
tence is a moving on, you know, and you see now that move you 
must, if not in one way then in the other. So at first you were 
driven forward, because you did not know how to move of your- 
self. Now you see and know and you move of your own volition. 
This indwelling spirit instructs, strengthens, guides, and com- 
forts you. You are no longer as a sheep without a shepherd. 

You see and know where before you were blind and ignorant. 
In your ignorance you believed yourself to be made of the dust 
of the ground with an uncertain and threatening hereafter before 
you when you should have finished your three score and ten years 
of this life; a life in which you were doomed to more or less suf- 
fering in spite of all you could do to avert it. 

Now, with your different self -idea, you believe this no longer. 
You can see, to some extent, the principle that governs the prob- 
lems of existence and determines their correct answer. You see 
that, logically, you are of the Eternal and not of the temporal, 
and that all existence is but the gradual knowing of your being. 
With your old view you made many mistakes, formed many con- 
clusions that were untrue by comparison with the eternal stand- 
ard, however true to you at the time. 

But those sins — for an error is a sin — are forgiven you be- 
cause they were not intentional; they were only natural. You 
were responsible for them in that you created the errors, or com- 
mitted the sins, but only according to the law of cause and effect. 
You were not morally responsible, because you did not intend to 
create an error, or commit a sin. Without intention there can 
be no moral responsibility. There can be no intention to do 



THE SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST. 83 

wrong til] there is perception of both a right and a wrong, and 
the difference between them. Intentional doing of a wrong is 
impossible to the Adam-soul — you — for it does not know either 
right or wrong. It acts naturally according to its nature. 

You formed your first self-idea and lived according to it, 
naturally, not intentionally. You sinned ignorantly and the for- 
giveness belongs to your lack of intention to sin. But now that 
you know what you did not know naturally, now that the Spirit 
of Truth has taken up its abode with you, if you deliberately and 
willfully act contrary to what you see and know, that sin cannot 
be forgiven you; for it is not natural, it is intentional, and you 
must work out its consequences to the uttermost. The law of 
cause and effect compels this result also. 

Dismiss the idea of a God who will interfere with this law 
and lift from off you the consequences of your own thoughts and 
acts. There is none such. You can see instead, readily, can you 
not, that there must be a wide difference between a wrong ig- 
norantly done, and one done intentionally? 

A child does many things that are unwise, because it is a 
child, because it acts naturally, or according to the nature of the 
child. These are forgiven it because it is the child and knows no 
better. In those acts there was no intention to do wrong. But 
when the child has become enlightened, the enlightenment makes 
him a boy of fifteen, makes him more than a naturally ignorant 
child. If this boy does what the child did, this forgiveness does 
not belong to him for he knew better than to do what he did. 
The possibility of this forgiveness is destroyed by himself, by his 
intention to do what he knew better than to do. 

The sin against the Holy Ghost is your own deliberate will- 
ful thought and action contrary to what you know to be true and 
right. Therefore the forgiveness that belongs naturally to lack 
of intention to do wrong cannot belong to you. 

If you act always according to your highest perception and 
conviction of right and wrong, you will never sin against the 
Holy Ghost, for this sin lies in intention only. Even though 
you make mistakes, they will not "be reckoned against you." 
They may be contrary sometimes to the eternal truth of being, 
but they are not contrary to your knowledge of that truth. You 
sin against the impersonal truth ignorantly, but you may sin 
against yourself knowingly. 

How many have feared for years, long painful years, that 
they had sinned the deadliest of all sins, the sin against the Holy 
Ghost; feared the more because they did not know what that sin 
was. They dared not ask God to forgive them, for that sin was 
beyond forgiveness, and existence became, consequently, a liv- 
ing tomb. How slow has been the coming of the " freedom of the 
Sons of God" ; but it has come for you when you see what you 
really are, instead of the degraded specimen of humanity seen 
through theological spectacles. 



84 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

Fear of hell has brought more penitents to the anxious seat 
than has love of God. You need have no fear of any damnation 
that you do not make for yourself. True, " he that shall blas- 
pheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in 
danger of eternal damnation " ; but this danger can be averted. 
You have but to act according to what you see and know and 
your future is safe. " The kingdom of God is within you * and 
you can enter in and dwell there, and no theological hobgoblins 
can destro} T your peace. 

God is Love, not wrath nor vengeance, and all along the 
line of your experiences that Almighty Love is working cease- 
lessly to manifest itself to you. Whatever the seeming to you, 
it is all-potent for you. Through whatever you come, it over- 
comes, and goes with you by day and by night to show the 
way in which you are going steadily toward God. Nothing can 
thwart its mighty purpose, turn it aside, prevent it from bless- 
ing you. 

Evil is but the attendant shadow. The steadily shining 
light is the infinite Love that draws all to itself. Even though 
clouds impede its rays, it is there all the while, doing its work 
ceaselessly, and you are feeling its benefits at those times when 
you can get out of the darkness and chill of the shadow. 

When you were a child your mother loved you. When you 
acted as the child, and, because of an unrestrained impulse, 
struck at her, she loved you just the same. Her love did not 
depend upon your recognition of it, but Oh! how much it be- 
came to you when you became able to recognize it. It waited 
for you, was faithful to you all the while you knew it not. It 
watched over and guarded you and led you in the way you should 
go, a constant presence that gave you only blessings. Yet how 
different was all when, no more a little child, you were capable 
of seeing and feeling that love. It remained the same for you, 
but it was far more to you than before. 

So God, that infinite Love that is God, is always the same 
for us, but becomes so much more to us when we see and know 
that to which we are at first blind, because we are children in 
self-knowledge. The all-wise Father displaces the implacable 
ruler and we rest content in the certainty of a divine protect- 
ing Love. 

Eecognize your eternal relation to God, and fear nothing 
but to act contrary to such light as you have. When you do 
this, you are always right, even if your thought is not exactly 
in accord with the truth of being. When you live according 
to this standard you will never sin the sin against the Holy 
Ghost. Feeling the mighty Presence you will part company 
with fear and trust it wholly. " Even though I walk through 
the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou 
art with me." 



UTILIZING ENEKGY. 

" What is the use of talking to me about mastering condi- 
tions, when I am constantly mastered by them? Against your 
theorizing stands the fact that I cannot help them." 

Permit a slight correction. Against the theorizing stands 
the fact that you have not yet helped them, and also, probably, 
the other fact that you do not know how to make the attempt. 
You have tried your best, and without result? That is quite 
true, no doubt, but your best may not be the best — the best way 
of overcoming them. There is such a difference between a blind 
resistance and an enlightened resistance, and unless you have be- 
come enlightened as to what and why you are, what and why 
these conditions are, you cannot have worked in the way that will 
yield the result you desire. 

You have tried to push them away from you with your own 
strength, instead of utilizing the strength that moves everything. 
There is this better way, the utilization of resistless energy, the 
very force that makes the grass grow, the water flow, the birds 
sing. It is an exhaustless supply that will work through any 
channel open to it, and you can take advantage of that fact and 
use it for your own betterment. 

Mankind has made many inventions, many labor-saving ap- 
pliances which have required less expenditure of personal strength 
and made possible a greater economy of time. Nature remains 
the same, her operations go forward as they always have gone for- 
ward, they are unchanged, but labor-saving inventions are utiliza- 
tions of what pertains to her. 

The sun still rises in the east, the dew is on the meadow- 
grass as usual, but the mower goes forth at sunrise with horses 
and a mowing machine, instead of with a scythe over his shoulder. 
In the machine he has many scythes where he used to have one, 
and instead of swinging it himself as he moves slowly step by step, 
he can sit quietly guiding the horses whose more rapid steps will 
give results far in excess of the old method. 

"What has changed? Nothing. More is utilized than for- 
merly, and so the method of work is changed, while results are in- 
creased. 

The old, old story of Creation, again and again repeated with 
each human soul, offers to you a great repository containing all 



86 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

you need. Your experience is your gradual acquaintance with it, 
and the learning how to draw from it according to your needs, 
how to utilize what may be utilized. 

As the soil holds lovingly the seed implanted in it, clasping 
it close and feeding it silently, so you are held in the warm em- 
brace of Nature and of God and fed silently from the exhaustless 
supply. 

As the seed contains potencies of the plant and the blossom, 
so you contain the potency of that glorified humanity that is 
divinity, and whether you know it or not, you are being nourished 
to that end. 

You are to blossom as the likeness of God, but you must first 
know the likeness of man. The plant precedes the blossom. And 
to your lesser likeness belong all your pain and discordant condi- 
tions. To your higher likeness belongs the power to rule them; 
but you rule after having been ruled. 

So far you have been ruled. In your human likeness you 
have toiled and suffered. You have felt the thorn in the flesh — 
many of them, and you wish they were not there. By utilization 
of what belongs to your greater likeness you may pluck them out 
of the flesh. 

If you do this work that is yours to do, you shall be crowned 
with it; you shall wear that most royal of all crowns, the crown of 
thorns. Woven into a regal diadem instead of rankling in the 
flesh, these thorns shall show their powerlessness beside the 
power of him who overcomes. 

Thorns and thistles does the ground of existence indeed bring 
forth unto us, and we smart under their sting; but when you see 
and know, you pluck them forth from your consciousness and 
prove your God-likeness by your work. 

" My grace is sufficient for thee," was the answer to Paul, 
" for my strength is made perfect in weakness." 

See the significance of that statement. " My strength is 
made perfect in weakness." There are three factors to be noted, 
strength, weakness, and a making perfect. In your human like- 
ness you are weak, you use your own strength. But there is a 
greater, an exhaustless strength that you may have, and you are 
to find and prove it as being beyond your personal strength, as 
you would not do were there not a weakness with which to com- 
pare strength and find one better than the other. 

" My strength " is what belongs to your God-likeness; your 
weakness belongs to your human likeness; your experience lies 
between the weakness and the strength, and that strength is suffi- 
cient for you, enables you to pluck out the rankling thorns. 

You have tested your own mere human strength, you have 
tried to get rid of suffering and disease, you have done what you 
could, even as the mower has done what he could. But when this 
mower is shown the new appliance, the greater utilization of force, 



UTILIZING ENERGY. 87 

may he not choose between continuing to work as formerly and 
using the later method? 

The work is the same, it is still his to do, but how to do it is 
a matter susceptible of betterment; and with use of the new appli- 
ance goes a larger measure of result. Suppose he turns his back 
upon the mowing machine, the loss is his own. What he might 
have he does not have, in consequence. Whose is the fault that 
he still toils days to accomplish what might be done in one? 

The power to master the thorns stands before you every time 
you read the life of him who wore the crown. " The works that 
I do ye shall do." The thorns will hurt and sting till you, too, 
pluck them out of the flesh. They do not pass from us, we pass 
from them, by growing greater, stronger, higher. 

Thought-Force is the resistless energy you need to utilize. 
Are you thinking frequently, " It is of no use, it cannot be done? " 
Then you are using Thought-Force to strengthen those conditions 
instead of lessening them, driving the thorns deeper into the flesh 
instead of drawing them out. Why not use it the other way? 
Why not let your strength be supplemented by the great 
Strength? " It can be done, and the great Power will accomplish 
it." Is not this better than " It cannot be done? " 

The persistence of your conditions is due to the resist- 
less energy of Thought-Force, for it brings to manifestation 
what you think. If this is true, it will also bring to manifes- 
tation a change in what you think, when you get ready to make 
the change. It does not select what shall appear in your body; 
you do, and the body is full of thorns or " grace and truth " as 
you elect. 

Can all these suffering conditions disappear immediately, all 
these thorns be plucked at once? Probably not, but they will go 
eventually if you utilize the resource that is ever at your right 
hand. 

Jesus is our example of what may be accomplished. As our 
elder brother he attained for the whole human family, in that he 
proved what was possible for the rest of the family. His crown 
of victory — not a sign of disgrace — may be our crown of victory. 
In it are all the consequences of our limited human nature, sense- 
consciousness and what belongs to it; selfishness, pride, envious- 
ness, falsehood, dishonesty, self-deception, that breed their prog- 
eny of disease and death. One and all they are to be put from 
us, plucked out of our life and so from our body, that we may be 
crowned with our achievements. 

" My grace is sufficient for thee." Do we get this needed 
help from those who are feeling the smart with us? It comes 
from a greater than they, and this greater is sufficient for all our 
needs. But Oh! how long it takes us to learn this lesson. A 
fatal obstacle is, " It cannot be done." That word you speak is 
made manifest. The work is not done. 

Year after year you speak this word, and year after year you 



88 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

gather your crop of thorns and thistles from the ground of exist- 
ence. You and the thorns are one, when your feeling should be, 
" I and the Father are one." 

If you were to go to a foreign country to represent the United 
States Government, for all practical purposes while there, you 
and that Government would be one, because it was represented in 
your person. Whatever you did, it would support, because it 
would do what you did. It would act through you, and your acts 
would be its acts to the people among whom you were placed. You 
would have little fear for results, knowing that this Govern- 
ment was at your back, supporting all you did. Your oneness 
with it would mean, and be more to you than your oneness with 
the people among whom you were living, and with their cus- 
toms. You would feel that the greater oneness would outlast the 
lesser oneness and give you the advantage every moment. Its 
strength would be your strength and you would not share in the 
experiences of the people to the same extent that would otherwise 
be the case. 

Can you not have some of the strength now, that oneness with 
God, consciousness of it, gives? And with that consciousness do 
you not have an advantage that other people have not? You 
share the weaknesses common to all who live in the world, but you 
may have that which is not of this world; and your power of resist- 
ance and overcoming will be increased proportionally. 

God's ambassador. What a position to hold! Conscious of 
oneness with God, you will watch how you think, speak, and act, 
for you must not disregard what your position compels. You 
must not commit your Government to anything it would be 
obliged to repudiate. Do not think or say that the thorns cannot 
be conquered. That work has been done, the proof has been 
given. Consequently your Government could not sanction that 
statement. 

Jesus was God's ambassador. His Government supported 
and sanctioned every declaration he made, furnished the proof 
that his words were true. In the person of that ambassador was 
shown what can be done for you and for all, but we must stand in 
the same place to have the same authority and support. 

You will be recalled some day, but before your return home 
you will be crowned for your work by being crowned with it. No 
king upon mortal throne can equal you then for regal splendor and 
power, even though a crucifying cross is hard by you, and the 
shouts of those who desire the robber rather than the victor ring 
in your ears. 

Death has no power to terrify you, no tomb can hold you. 
Conqueror of more than a worldly kingdom, with eyes that see far 
beyond a modern Pilate's judgment hall, you stand unmoved on 
sunlit heights, while the surging throng presses toward Calvary. 



NATURAL AM) CONTROLLED OLD AGE. 

Hate to grow old, do you? 

Dread old age as }'ou would a plague? 

Well, all your dread will not keep it from you, but a dif- 
ferent mental state will make old age something quite different 
from what it otherwise will be. 

Why should you dread it? What is it? The unpleasant 
pictures of old age you have seen, both actually and mentally, 
have something to do with your dislike. You have seen feeble 
old men and women who were dependent upon others for care, 
incapable of caring for themselves; seen them full of crochets, 
irascible and impatient, and you have pictured yourself in the 
same condition. You have seen scanty gray hair, wrinkled faces, 
withered hands, a bent back, uncertain footsteps, and you have 
shrunk from such a future. 

You are ready to do almost anything to escape it; and you 
read of the many things that can be done to avoid it, ways and 
means becoming more numerous as time goes on. You decide 
that you will live on this diet, follow that regimen, go to another 
country, or do one or more of the many things recommended as a 
cure for old age. 

You might as well decide to fly to the moon as to attempt to 
escape old age by these or any other methods, for you cannot 
eventually cheat Nature even though you succeed in parleying 
with her for a while; but with even a little true self-knowledge, 
faithfully applied, you may escape the kind of old age you shrink 
from. 

Look into yourself, first, for a moment and find your motive. 
Why do you dread old age? Because you do not wish to be de- 
pendent upon others and because of your vanity. Now do not 
offer an indignant denial of the latter half of the reason, for it is 
true, as you will find if you can bring yourself to be honest with 
yourself. 

How our looks play a prominent part in our thoughts till 
something more important takes its place. This is all right, no 
one should be regardless of his appearance, but how the desired 
end is best accomplished may be a matter worthy of consideration. 

First, let us look at the difference between eld age and an 
undesirable hind of old age, which is the difference between 



90 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

Nature and what is added to Nature. Look out into this great 
beautiful world and observe how the seasons follow each other. 

A seed is planted in the spring, it germinates and a green 
plant is the result. This plant, first small and tender, grows 
larger and stronger, forsaking its early youth and reaching out 
toward its maturity. A bud appears, is followed by a blossom, 
summer and autumn succeed the spring, the winter of rest and 
refreshment is the result. The existence of this plant is governed 
by law and is according to the order compelled by the nature of 
the seed. 

Equally is this true of you, the human plant. You have 
your seasons, your spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and all 
are beautiful in themselves. It is you who ignorantly make any 
one of them otherwise. Your seasons may not comprise the same 
period of time as those you see in the vegetable kingdom, but 
there is likeness between them. In that kingdom they are con- 
tained in one year, in the human kingdom in many years, but 
there is but one overruling law in all kingdoms. 

As a living soul you have your period of germination, your 
flowering and fruitage. This order is a growing old, a maturing 
that is compelled by the nature of being and of existence. You 
are to fulfil your destiny through the maturing of your capabili- 
ties and powers, to grow old in the appointed way, but you may 
keep your youthfulness in your old age. 

You, not your physical coat of skin, is what we are speaking 
of, though that coat has claimed most of your attention when it 
should have been given to yourself. Have you not learned that 
your outer body, the physical body is but the representative of 
that which is more? The representative of you and your body, 
the body that would be yours did you die to-day? 

Your hidden body, the body that you feel but do not see, is 
but clothed with the body you do see. That belongs to Nature, 
while the hidden body belongs to you. You are a living soul, and 
the common dust of the ground is integrated in shape as your coat 
of skin. Your body is formed in this mold and the mold can and 
will be cast off one day. 

Your body, the inner body, is subject to transformation. It 
is plastic and will yield to the workman's tools. The outer coat 
of skin, because it is a coat only, and not the soul-embodiment 
(the body carried along with the changing seasons), is not subject 
to like transformation. 

As the representative of being, in the three score and ten of 
its period is represented the whole process from germination to 
rest. Its infancy and its old age, with all that belongs between 
them, are but the handwriting that reveals the nature and order 
of the soul-process resulting in maturity of self-consciousness; 
the illustration, but not the thing itself. 

"Why should you desire and strive to keep the coat of skin 



NATURAL AND CONTROLLED OLD AGE. 91 

from showing marks of age ? The growth from Adam to Christ is 
illustrated in its changes, the advance from being without know- 
ing it, to the full realization of being and the power this realiza- 
tion confers. The whole process of creation, from the " dark- 
ness " " upon the face of the deep " to " I am the light of the 
world " is written there in seventy years — for the eyes that can 
read the writing. 

But you make your body while Nature writes her record upon i 
your coat of skin. So you will find it far more profitable to attend 
to your own work than to meddle with hers. Your work glorifies 
her work, and your body will glorify her body. Your body will 
glorify the natural body when you have made it what you may, 
and then there will be no repulsive features about old age. 

Have you not observed a great difference in people of the 
same age? Some are so much more youthful than others and 
their youthfulness is not affectation either. Youthfulness does 
not mean childishness, but a spontaneity of soul that is like a 
bubbling spring of water in a thirsty land. It is this youthful- 
ness, this freshness and spontaneity of soul, even when the hair 
is gray, that glorifies Nature's old age and makes it beautiful, 
that removes all you fear and shrink from. 

Whatever the outer aspect you are no older than you feel. 
You will never be in any way repulsive, however many years you 
may retain your coat of skin, if you keep young in soul, as you 
can if you know how. By this youthfulness of soul is not meant 
lack of maturity, but the carrying of youthfulness, not childish- 
ness, into maturity. 

In our New Testament we have an example in the person of 
Jesus of Nazareth of this combination of youthfulness with ma- 
turity. The Soul is older than time because of its origin and 
nature, but in existence it wears the marks of its existence, 
growth and maturity. With these may be continued that eternal 
youth that wells up within and overflows into the life, if we do not 
check and smother the flow. 

Be yourself. This is the first important rule to follow. Do 
not try to be like any one you see or know, but aim to be like 
your own highest ideal. Copy no one, let yourself, your eternal 
self, be written in flesh. Be natural, not artificial, give your in- 
most deepest self free outlet. Be spontaneous, not stilted. 

Do you know what is necessary for this spontaneity, for the 
free outflowing of the self that never grows old? The ability 
to put your foot upon the neck of your animal self, a keen moral 
sense that checks its spontaneity and holds in a firm grasp that 
which seeks outlet. 

To rule the one is to permit the other. To master the lesser 
self is to give freedom to the deeper and higher self. One is held 
in the meshes of self-deception if, mistaking license for free- 
dom, he permits the lower impulses to have their way with him. 



92 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

This is not freedom, it is bondage, and how much license has 
worn the mask of freedom for those that mistake psychic intoxi- 
cation for spirituality. 

First the natural, afterward the spiritual. You feel the 
strength of the natural impulses in you, you covet your neigh- 
bor's goods; but you can say, " Be still," to the impulse and so 
open the way for your higher nature to manifest itself. There 
can be no spontaneity of the deeper self when the sense-man 
bars the way. 

A clean mental house is the first requisite. One cannot af- 
ford to be spontaneous who has anything to conceal. If there is 
much hidden within which he cannot afford to have known, the 
path of higher spontaneity is clogged. The need to live under 
cover instead of in the open light is fatal to this spontaneity. 
Without it old age is not glorified. Without this glorification the 
merely natural is not attractive. 

Whether any one will ever know it or not, whether you ever 
carry it out in act or not, put that thought, that imagination in 
which you are indulging in secret, away from you. Cast it out, 
do not harbor it, it is unworthy of your high calling. It will 
leave its mark upon your face if you hold it long enough, and it is 
better to prevent than to cure. The angel cannot look forth 
when the devil stands in the way. 

When you care more for what you are within, than for how 
you look without, you will attend to that mental housecleaning 
that permits the likeness of God to look forth from your eyes, 
shine in your face, speak in your voice. 

Did you realize for a moment the joy of the freedom for him 
who has nothing to conceal, and, consequently, to fear, you would 
lose sight of your looks, your dread of old age, your fear of de- 
pendence, and thank God that you were alive, for the rest is in 
your own power. 

The phenomenal world is yours, and all in it is subject unto 
you. The psychic world is yours, and all in it is subject unto 
you, when you do not invite control by your mental state. Like 
attracts like and what you harbor within draws toward it its kind. 
An unclean mental house compels an unclean life. But a clean 
mental house, bringing a clean life, opens the way for the divine 
self to appear and glorify the life. 

Have you never seen in the faces of those who look toward 
the heavenly hills a light that is not of the sun, neither of the 
moon? A light that is from so far and yet is so near, that trans- 
figures the face and makes it beautiful with a beauty that stills 
the senses and awes the beholder? Old or young, as we reckon 
time, though it is seldom seen in the young, experience being 
needed to lift the veil, we look in wonder and feel a solemnity 
that goes with us for days as we recall the face. It has no old age, 
this light, and the face it illumines is glorified. 



THE USE OF EEMEDIES. 

You are greatly perplexed over a question that you feel you 
must answer for yourself, are you? It has bothered and bothered 
you, and you want to do what is right? 

u Is it right for me, under any circumstances, to take medi- 
cine or employ a physician? n 

All who aim to follow the metaphysical, rather than the 
physical, view of existence, are confronted with this problem. 

That you must never violate your conviction of right, is a 
foregone conclusion. No one who is true to his own ideal can 
do this. But the question of all questions is, " What is right? * 

Eight and wrong are adjustable terms when applied to things 
relative. They are terms of comparison, according to an ac- 
cepted standard. This standard may not be absolute; and then 
the terms cannot be absolute. What is wrong for one is right for 
another, because what is wrong to one is right to another. 

One is always right, in a moral sense, when he acts according 
to his conviction of right, and is always wrong when he acts 
contrary to it, because his action is true to, or contrary to, the 
standard which is his. And when he is acting rightly, from an- 
other's point of view his action is wrong, because the other's 
standard for conduct is different. 

Settle this one thing with yourself, first. " It is right for 
me to act according to my own conviction of right, and wrong 
for me to violate it." 

Then comes the next step, "According to what standard 
shall I form my own conviction of right ? " 

Here there may well be hesitancy, for equally good people 
have contrary standards. The difference of opinion compels. 
" But I" you say, " have a fixed standard according to which to 
regulate my actions. I have come to see that I am a spiritual 
being, always have been and always will be a spiritual being; that 
I have no part or lot in matter. My substance is the infinite 
Mind that is God. From that source I draw all my supply. 
Nothing can cut me off from that source of supply, and it is 
sufficient for every need. Because I am a perfect spiritual being, 
there is no reality to disease, pain, and suffering." 

This is true. In your real eternal being you are what you 
say. Your real being needs no remedies and no physician. 



94 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

What more do you know about what you are? What do you 
see when you look in a mirror? 

" What I see in the mirror is the body or machine that repre- 
sents me and that I use for a time. It is not I." 

You say you are eternal, and yet that you are using something 
for a time. You confess yourself a little puzzled as to how to 
make reconciliation between the eternal and time, do you? 

It is only the difference between the changeless real, and the 
changing phenomenal. Your being is the changeless real and it 
needs no physic. It is never diseased. It has Likeness to God. 
Time is the process of manifesting that Likeness, the actualizing 
of the abstract truth of being as a living fact. Time, in short, is 
the process by which you find yourself. 

Now, though in being you are free from all dis-ease, discord, 
in your self-consciousness you are not so free. Now and then 
you have a sense of dis-ease, or discord, of lack of harmony that 
you must deal with. It overcomes you temporarily till you be- 
come able to overcome it. 

" Is it wrong to have a sense of illness? " 

No. When you are enlightened as to the nature of your 
real being, it is a mistake to let the sense cloud your vision and 
bias your judgment; to be deceived by it. 

Because of your not-yet-attained mastery conditions that 
are relative to existence now and then confront you. You have 
made many affirmations, read metaphysical literature every day, 
declared your conviction as to the " unreality of matter," tried to 
keep your thoughts upon the plane of reality, and yet one day 
you had a sense of illness that was prostrating. How surprised 
you were. " I did not think it possible this could happen to 
me," you said to yourself. 

You suffered acutely and you treated yourself faithfully. 
Another treated you also, and your sense of violent suffering did 
not abate. Your family was alarmed and begged you to take 
something or do something that was visible, that they could see. 
You refused, remaining true to your conviction that it was wrong 
to use any remedy because you were " a spiritual being and Mind 
is all." Your sense of suffering grew more acute, your family 
more alarmed, and finally you yielded and drank the hot, strong 
dose of something or other that was brought to your bedside. 

You experienced relief from your sense of physical suffering, 
but how you tormented yourself because of the way in which it 
was brought about. Your remorse was as keen as your sense of 
pain had been. You had done wrong, you had forsaken your 
principles, you had violated your ideal, you had been untrue to 
your conviction. 

This is an illustration of the situation compelling the ques- 
tion you want to answer satisfactorily. 

All sense of discord, whatever the name, pertains to the find- 



THE USE OF REMEDIES. 95 

ing and proving of your real being — to existence. Conditions 
pertain only to the conditional, not to the absolute. Your real 
being is absolute to existence, and the existence of your self- 
consciousness is relative to your changeless being. This exist- 
ence therefore is conditioned, and you, as a living soul in time, 
are to gain mastery over its conditions by the help of your being 
— of its resources. 

Experience of conditions possible to existence does not en- 
tirely cease with knowledge that the real being is above and be- 
yond them. They cease only by ascension above their plane. 

Try to see the nature and purpose of existence before you 
fix your standard of right and wrong in this matter. See the 
relative as well as the absolute, and how to reconcile one with the 
other. 

The material world and all it contains is for use. Till you 
understand and use, you are used. You are used by Nature as a 
means for her manifestation to you. You are to use all that 
confronts you, exchanging servitude for mastery. You are to 
see, read, use, dominate. If you cannot use anything material 
without coming into subjection to it, it is using you; and with all 
your boasted freedom you are still servant. 

For you, for every one who has gained an idea of what he is 
in being, there must be individual choice as to how far he will 
employ material means for the living of his daily life. In the 
main, all agree to employ food, heat, clothing, protection from 
the weather in the shape of a dwelling; and yet some say " I can 
make no concession to materiality by using a remedy." 

A heated dwelling is a remedy for cold, clothes are a remedy 
for extremes of heat and cold, food is a remedy for hunger, sleep 
is a remedy for fatigue. All are making " concessions to ma- 
teriality" by using remedies for possible conditions. All are 
obliged to make such concessions before they become able to mas- 
ter the conditions that call for them. Both the conditions and 
their remedies belong to a state of consciousness that is natural. 

You are trying to 'co-operate with the Great Push that im- 
pels you toward a higher state, the spiritual. This is wise. 

Can you not leave the natural state and still be in it? Is this 
a paradox? In the world but not of it, is the same thing. 

In your views, ideals, convictions, emotions, you may be be- 
yond the natural state while outwardly you still belong to it. In 
your inner life you may be of another world while still in the 
natural one. You will still use the remedies against hunger, cold, 
the weather, nevertheless; but they will not be to you, and con- 
sequently for you in your inner life, what they used to be. 

You are using them, not they you, for you see clearly their 
nature, the limit of their usefulness, their true relation to you. 
You are deceived by none of them because you are not self-de- 
ceived. Using them according to enlightenment instead of ac- 



96 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

cording to ignorant subjection, you are their master, and by right. 
Beaching this state wherein the eye is single, you will never 
mistake a means for an end, and your judgment will be according 
to the standard of right relation between visible and invisible. 

If you " would rather die than use a remedy " die right away 
as quickly as you can, for you are using a number most of the 
time. 

"All things are mine, but I will be deceived by none of 
them " is a better conviction. 

What you drank from the glass was only a means of making 
an impression on you that was an impulse toward recovery of 
equilibrium. 

There are worse people than physicians. Putting aside the 
incredulity and obstinacy that result from the belief that the 
physical body is the man, they are a noble body of men and 
women, entitled to all honor for their efforts for humanity. Do 
not betray an ignorant prejudice and fanaticism by declaring that 
" Never, under any circumstances, would I employ a physician." 
When you stand upon the top round of the ladder of existence 
you can afford to say this, not before. 

Because you may have come to see that all things are yours 
for use according to your need, and that you are lawful ruler over 
them, shall you fall back into your old way and run for some 
bottle, immediately you have a sense of discomfort? Or send a 
messenger in hot haste for the nearest physician? This would 
show that you were still self-deceived, were being used by the 
material instead of using it. 

If you have gained the required enlightenment, for you it 
must be, " first the spiritual, afterward the natural/' Your first, 
not your last, impulse and effort will be for the mental, rather 
than the material means. 

Observe yourself and note whether your first impulse when 
experiencing a sense of illness, is toward mental or material means 
and remedies. If you find that your first impulse is toward the 
old way and means it is still with you " First the natural, after- 
ward the spiritual "; and your knowledge is only theoretical. Ke- 
generation still awaits you. 

If your first spontaneous impulse is for a spiritual remedy, 
your regeneration is begun, and drinking a gallon of hot ginger 
will not check it, necessarily. 

Beware, however, that you do not use liberty as license. You 
have liberty, the liberty of sons of God, to use whatever the world 
naturally contains; but if you make this liberty license, you will 
misuse and suffer the consequence. You will become darkened 
in your inner consciousness instead of more enlightened. 

Seeing that you stand between the eternal and the temporal, 
and understanding why, all you have to do is to settle which 
shall be first for you, and then you may go on your way rejoicing. 



THE SWING OP THE PENDULUM. 

You have changed greatly in the last few years, have you 
not? 

You used to live for the day, for self -gratification tempered 
with your duty to others; but now you try to live for the great 
all of which this life is only a stage. Your desires, thoughts, 
and feelings are quite different. The worldly goods and pleas- 
ures are not now enough for you. 

An aspiration for what lies beyond them draws you higher. 
A few years have passed since you felt this new impulse, enough 
for you to look upon your old self with wonderment. It seems 
as if you never could have been what its face reveals, and yet, 
at that time, you did not realize any special lack. 

You tried to discharge your duties to others, speak well 
of your neighbor, and keep square with the world. Beyond 
these you felt justified in doing as you chose, in living as best 
suited you. 

But what a difference between then and now. What has 
made the difference? 

You came into a knowledge one day, unexpectedly per- 
haps, of which you had not dreamed, and at once all was made 
new for you. You saw a meaning to existence, a meaning for 
yourself, why you were here, to what end all tends, and with a 
rush you went over to the metaphysical side of life. Now the 
physical side seems so far away from you, and you wonder how 
you could ever have been what you were. 

But your experience has been strictly according to law, 
the law that governs existence and that has common applica- 
tion. First the natural, afterward the spiritual. You were what 
you were, naturally. You were born blind. You were blind 
from your birth. Your natural existence was blindness to the 
truth of being. Natural existence itself, or birth, because of 
its limitations, is a natural blindness that time and experience 
must deal with and remove. 

When you got your eyes open to see, the glory was dazzling; 
and now you are threatened with blindness again. Not the old 
blindness' but one equally an obstacle in the way of higher re- 
sults for yourself. 



y« HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

This dazzling glory that shines around us when we have 
our eyes open to see it, this glorious truth of being, that we 
are whole and complete forever as God's image and likeness, is 
sometimes too much to be borne, and we need still another 
revelation to help us out of the next darkness. 

You have become extreme in your views, have gone as far 
the other way. Once you would have had nothing to do with 
things metaphysical, would have ignored them all and turned 
your back squarely upon them. Now you are doing just the 
same thing in another direction. You are trying to ignore 
things physical, and to turn your back squarely upon them. 

Like a pendulum you have gone from the extreme limit of 
one side to the extreme limit on the other. In both cases you are 
blind. One kind of blindness is better than another, perhaps, 
but it is best not to be blind at all. 

Has it occurred to you that in refusing to give any place 
in your life to things material you have tried — and vainly — to 
disrupt the order of the universe? 

True it is that your real being is the image of God, that 
your flesh and blood body is not yourself, that the material things 
constituting your sense environment may disappear utterly from 
your vision and have, therefore, no permanent reality. Though 
this is all true, it is not all that is true, and never had you more 
need of knowledge than to-day. 

You are the pendulum trying to remain fixed at one ex- 
treme because you were once fixed at the opposite extreme. 
Your motive for the effort is good and worthy, but the direc- 
tion in which it acts might be changed with advantage. 

The point of equilibrium for the pendulum is the place of 
poise between the two extremes. Your own true poise will be 
found midway between the extreme of your old life and the 
extreme of the new whose glory has dazzled you. 

The golden mean is truly golden, for it is the way of wis- 
dom. In it she walks with firm feet and reverent mien, with 
calm upturned face, serene, untroubled eyes. In this path the 
light always reveals, and never dazzles. Try for this poise. Cease 
ignoring anything whatever. Look at everything, physical and 
metaphysical, in order to look through everything. 

Parallel lines never meet. This is self-evidently true. 
Draw them for yourself and see how true it is, so: . 

Though they extend infinitely they will never run together. 
This is truth and truth is fixed. It never compromises, does it? 

One of these lines represents what you are in the real of 
you, a spiritual being, eternal, never diseased or changed. The 
other line is materiality, what you, the real you, are not; the 
physical mold and body. What you are in the real of you, 
and what you are not, will never blend together as one whole. 

While this is true, it is not all that is true, for you, as a 



THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM. 99 

living soul, are neither of these lines; yon are their point of 
unity. Now draw them again and add a third line, so: | 

The perpendicular line is yourself as a living soul. One 
of the parallel lines is your real being, the other your body and 
material environment. 

You are, you see, related to both, and it is not wise in you 
to ignore either. Without you they can never unite. In them- 
selves they are opposites. But in you they unite, because you 
are related to both. In you they find conjunction. You are 
to find each, and live toward each, according to the nature of 
each and your relation to it. In you they are to be reconciled, 
opposites though they are, because you are to be reconciled 
to both. 

Begin at the left of the upper line, move to its end, and 
through the perpendicular line to the lower line, out on that 
lower line to its extremity on the left. You see that although 
these parallel lines do not, and can not meet, there is an open 
road from the left extremity of one to the corresponding ex- 
tremity of the other. That road runs through yourself, the 
mediator between the two. 

To see yourself as this mediator in whom these two lines 
meet, and understand why you are the mediator, is to find your 
true poise, the golden mean, the way in which wisdom walks. 

You have friends who have not made the discovery that 
you have made. They are living in the old way, seeing all things 
through the old idea that they are made of matter, are subject 
to its laws, to all possible conditions of disease, sorrow, and 
pain. They look upon you as a " crank," think your " notions " 
the craziest under the sun, tell you to put your hand in the fire 
or eat arsenic and find out whether you are able to cope with 
matter or not. 

You pity their ignorance and blindness, and consider them 
the deluded ones; and you stand each at opposite ends of the 
swing of the pendulum. 

They do not know enough to know the relation of the meta- 
physical to the physical, and their own relation to both. You 
do not know enough to know the relation of the physical to 
the metaphysical and your relation to both. They need to learn 
what you have learned, and you need to learn more. 

Though the parallel lines are forever distinct in themselves, 
in you they are not separate; and because you, a living soul, 
are their point of unity, you must deal with both. Therefore, 
do not make the use of material things a torment for your con- 
science. This is a great mistake. All things on both lines are 
yours, and you are God's. Not your employment of them, but 
the motive which determines how you employ them, is the all 
important thing. Till you learn this and act accordingly they 
use you, though you never touch them. 

LofC. 



100 HOW TO CONTROL CIRCUMSTANCES. 

Because the force of your new impulse has carried you to 
the other extreme, you " want nothing more to do with mat- 
ter/' "Mind is all, and matter is nothing/' you say; there- 
fore you will depend upon mental means only, under all cir- 
cumstances. 

You make this a matter of conscience, and judge every one 
according to the standard that you have set up. If others do 
not do as you are doing, they are doing wrong. And all . the 
while things material are related to you in spite of your attitude 
and conscience, and you are using them every hour in the day. 

Look for the golden mean — as perhaps you will not so 
long as you make a matter of conscience of that which is purely 
impersonal because it is Nature. Though in your real being 
you are free from all conditions that pertain to materiality, in 
your self-consciousness you are not entirely free. You are still 
related to them, or they are still related to you, and in spite of 
your theory you can not yet do without them. 

You mistake when you make use of material means for 
conditions pertaining to a stage of existence, a matter of con- 
science; when you demand of others that they shall act accord- 
ing to your standard. Not act, but motive for act, is a matter 
of conscience. 

If you are using them in fear, because your whole depend- 
ence is in them, you are in bondage to them. The bondage is 
a mistake. If you are using them as their lawful master who 
says, because he understands relationships, " Suffer it to be so 
now," you are out of bondage, and all such use is lawful to you. 

The modern metaphysical teaching is presented too much 
as a religion and too little as a science. Mistake in the applica- 
tion of the teaching is a consequence. You cannot be too positive 
in your feeling or statement that the spiritual reality of being is 
changeless and eternal, and the body you look upon is material 
and is not you; that neither matter nor existence can make con- 
ditions for your real being, which is conditional only by its 
relation to the absolute God. But you can be too extreme in 
your immediate application of this truth to the circumstances 
of daily life. You need to establish through yourself, in yourself, 
for yourself, the relation of the material to the spiritual, of one 
parallel line to the other. Though there be a great gulf between 
them, you, as a living soul, are the bridge over that gulf. 

You have the right of choice; not choice of what anything 
is in itself, for that is compelled by the relation of cause and 
effect. But you choose what any and all things shall be to you. 
As this is your privilege as an individual, see that you grant it 
to others also. Your neighbor must follow his own conscience, 
not yours. 



Dee 11 UiOl 



DEC 7 1901 






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